


The Carnival-Prince and the Jewels of the Night Court

by Anonysquirrel (chibirisuchan)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-typical history of abuse (Critical Role-style), Canon-typical questionable consent issues (Kushiel-style), Canon-typical questionable contracts around sex work (Kushiel-style), Clothing Porn, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Flower Imagery, GFY, MollymaukLivesFest, Multi, No dead LGBTQIA characters dammit, Other, Sensuality and sexuality attempted by an ace author lolwut, Tarot imagery, They are on a quest to kick said abuser's ass and look stylish doing it, liberal use of profanity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-05 00:18:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chibirisuchan/pseuds/Anonysquirrel
Summary: Once upon a time, in a land that fancied itself the Realm of Angels, a Tsingano man named Moondrop came upon an exquisite rarity: a demon’s child half covered in the tattoos of the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, scarlet-eyed and lavender-skinned and speaking a language that none of the Tsingani understood.(Molly and the Critical Role cast in a Kushiel's Legacy AU, for the Mollymauk Lives Fest. Nobody dies here who doesn't deserve it. Fandom: Fixing what canon broke one AU at a time.)





	1. Preface and stuff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Preface, world setup, warnings, and some ranting; next chapter is fic proper.

Feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter for actual fic! This is kind of a preface.

 The rough setup here is that the Critical Role cast inhabits the Kushiel's Legacy world instead of their own. (Kushiel fans, if you're here for Kushiel characters, I'm sorry; this will not be your type of fic!)

Huge thanks to three-rings and Fern for beta-reading the first few chapters of this! Anything I have screwed up is totally on me, and some of this hasn't been beta-read because there's no time; apologies in advance for anything I miss.

**More information about the warnings**

TW for profanity; Beau swears a LOT and Molly uses profanity like a scalpel. 

TW for panic attacks and dissociation: Caleb has a traumatic history. Some of that comes up as backstory and there are some depictions of panic and dissociative episodes. 

TW for questionable consent: The Kushiel world structure has got some hazardous waters regarding consent. The official One Commandment is "love as thou wilt," but there are also a bucketful of reasons the Kushiel canon characters get either legally or financially or politically pressured to love as someone else wilt too. I'm not doing anything the canon hasn't done, and I'm not going as far as canon goes in most cases. But if you're not familiar with Kushiel canon, you may wish to tread carefully. I have a bit more of an outline and a wiki link below if anyone wants to explore whether this setup is safe for them.

**More info about the world for those unfamiliar with Kushiel canon**

The City of Elua is the capital of the country of Terre d'Ange, an almost-France-that-could-have-been if literal angels had sauntered out of heaven and interbred with the local populace. 

The Servants of Naamah are religiously-blessed sex workers; the Night Court in the City of Elua follow several different traditions amid houses named for night-blooming flowers. The courtesans of the Night Court spend several years in training, then put a portion of their earnings toward the tattoos (marques) that will represent how much they've paid of their debt to the house that raised and fed them for years. (However, Molly doesn't know any of this, so you're going to get some snarky outsider-POV commentary as he untangles the details over the course of the fic.)

One of the houses is Mandrake House, which is canonically about dominance and often about pain. They're not intrinsically evil in canon, but I've dropped Trent Ikithon in charge of them, and he's the total antagonist of this fic, so Mandrake House is not going to be getting the most balanced portrayal here.

The Kushiel canon also has a portrayal of a Roma-like culture called the Tsingani that plays a prominent role in some of the books. I'm being as careful as I can with my replica of it, as someone not of either of those cultures; I felt like it was important to keep for this story. Molly's own canon involves a happy past with a close-knit troupe of traveling circus performers that maps so closely onto the happy parts of the Tsingani that I wanted to try to use that parallel respectfully.

There's [a whole wiki out there for helpful reference](http://kushiel.wikia.com/wiki/Court_of_Night-Blooming_Flowers) if desired.

 

Okay, here we go!


	2. 0: The Fool: Mollymauk of the Longest Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Fool: The royal jester, the trickster of folklore, the prodigal son, the beginning of the hero’s journey. Playful and mischievous, innocent and spontaneous. Freedom to explore.
> 
> Our story begins with an unexpected stop on the Longest Road.

Once upon a time, in a land that fancied itself the Realm of Angels, a Tsingano man named Moondrop came upon an exquisite rarity: a demon’s child half covered in the tattoos of the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, scarlet-eyed and lavender-skinned and speaking a language that none of the Tsingani understood.

He was wrapped in a rich tapestry that depicted a silvery dragon, and in nothing else. The Tsingani decided that he had to be d’Angeline by upbringing even if not by bloodright, because he had no shame in giving the tapestry over for cleaning and walking about bare as the moonlight, smiling at everyone who met his eyes.

After a few days of watching him pick up the dances of the children and braid wildflowers into anything he could strand and laugh at tones of voice despite words he couldn’t recognize, they named him for the great white birds that soared across the oceans, never seeming to need to touch the muddy mundane earth at all as they flew their own longest road.

Then, after a few weeks of watching him delight in colors and textures and glittering glass and rich jewelry alike, Fletchfeather said to the others that perhaps they ought to have named him Maggie rather than Molly, because he clearly had a magpie’s eye for sparkles mixed in with a mollymawk’s effortless soaring spirit.

Moondrop privately agreed, but it was too late; all the children knew him as Mollymauk je’Lungo-drom, Mollymauk of the Longest Road, because he might have been _gadje_ but he was also theirs now.

In his first year with them, they taught him the language of the d’Angelines, both because he would have need of it and to keep their own secrets. In his second, they realized he’d already picked up enough of the Tsingani tongue to make it as useless for secret-keeping as word-spelling was for children old enough to have learned their letters. And so they taught him everything their own children learned, whether it was framed as word or song or circus-arts, book-reading or people-reading or crowd-reading.

(Of the lot, Mollymauk much preferred reading people and crowds to reading books; people gave their reader hints as to whether they had been read well. Books gave a person no help at all.)

Mollymauk picked up the Tsingani sword-dances as though he’d been born to them, and mimicked the cadences and intonations of tale-spinning even when he barely had the d’Angeline words to tell them with. He juggled walnuts found at the roadside and gambled for flowers and kisses until Fletchfeather gave him a handful of coins. In the next town he visited, he tripled his take gambling at cards, then spent everything he had on a ridiculous harlequin-coat and a fistful of glass-glittering jewelry, and went back to trading for kisses and flowers and bird-feathers with cheerful aplomb.

The only real difficulty came from the women’s insistence that he could never read the _dromonde_ in the cards for the _gadje_ , because true prophecy was exclusively the domain of the women of the Tsingani, and it was forbidden to men.

“Look at me; I’m no man of the Tsingani,” Mollymauk protested, spinning in place with his hands out. “None of your men ever stood in front of you horned, fanged, and nose to tail-tip purple; whatever I am, I’m not of your menfolk.”

“By the same coin, neither are you a woman of the Tsingani,” Ornna said, and Mollymauk had to admit that was also true.

“Teach me the cards anyway. I don’t need to speak the _dromonde_ to fleece the _gadje_ with parlor-tricks and tall tales. No need to offer up true diamonds when cut-glass sparkles bright enough for a good night’s show.”

Ornna had to admit that was equally true, and they made a bit of a gambling-game of it. He wheedled and flattered and bribed the cards from her one at a time, and she taught him the stories at leisure, so that he could learn the intricacies and implications behind the images.

She taught him the last three cards as they set up their tents for their first performance outside the walls of the City of Elua, and it was a good thing that she had done so.

After their second performance, the crownsguard stormed into the tent and arrested Moondrop and Fletchfeather for the kidnapping and abduction of an adept of the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, at the reporting of a Cassiline brother who had recognized the hand behind the making of the blade-dancer’s tattoos.


	3. IX. The Hermit: Brother Caleb of the Cassiline Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hermit: Introspection, isolation, soul-searching, following an independent spiritual path. Nonconformity. A need for spiritual healing.
> 
> (Brother Caleb hadn't expected gratitude, but he also hadn't expected this.)

Brother Caleb hadn’t expected gratitude from any of the thieves, but he’d expected some level of understanding of the magnitude of what they had done. To steal an adept from the Night Court in the capital city, with his marque only half-made, and put him on display throughout the provinces, and then return to the capital as though they thought their entire audience to be ignorant witlings? It would be comically brazen if it were not so serious a crime.

He honestly hadn’t expected the adept to be just as bewildered and outraged as those who had kidnapped him. Or to insist that there had been no kidnapping at all.

“I don’t know who you people are,” the adept said, arms crossed tight across his chest and tail lashing vehemently. “I don’t know anything about a night court or a Lucien nó Mandrake. The Tsingani took me in, fed me, clothed me, taught me everything I know--”

“Everything you know?” Brother Caleb asked. “What do you know of who you were before they found you?”

“I don’t remember,” the adept admitted, shaken. “But I don’t bloody well _care_. That person _isn’t me.”_

“The dowayne of Mandrake House claims otherwise, and has documentation of--”

“Papers and marks and bullshit, yes, I heard you the first three times,” the adept said. “Have you any understanding of what this whole story sounds like from my side of this table? How would you take to waking up one day and having your entire monastic order arrested for just going about doing your regular everyday monk-things? To being told that your body used to belong to an indentured sex worker who beat up other people for somebody else’s fun and profit?”

“The Cassiline Order takes vows of chastity--”

“In other words, it’d sound pretty damn insane to you?”

“...Yes,” Brother Caleb admitted. “It would.”

“Well, then.” The adept’s startling eyes had no pupils, but Brother Caleb felt the force of his stare regardless. “What are the options here? What’s going to happen to the Tsingani?”

“I don’t know,” Brother Caleb sighed. “If you swear that they did not take you against your will, that they simply rescued you after your disappearance and memory loss, then Mandrake House has no cause to seek recompense from them. Only… um… from you, for the remaining debt owed upon your marque.”

The adept stared at him for another long moment, and then said, “ _Fuck you._ Fuck your House Mandrake with a rusty fork. Sideways.”

Passing both hands down his face, Brother Caleb said a little desperately, “I have no desire to see an innocent sold into service for a bargain he has no memory of making. If you would prefer a Cassiline life -- vows of chastity and devotion--”

“Fuck you all.”

“Lucien--”

_“That is not my name!”_

“ _Mollymauk,_ ” Brother Caleb said. “I believe you are absolutely sincere in this. But I also believe that you were once an adept of the Night Court, even if Mandrake House is no longer your heart’s inclination. And I understand the Mandrake dowayne’s insistence as well -- if any debt could be voided by a bout of amnesia, then any contract would be unworthy of its own writing.”

“So where, then, does that leave me?”

“If you were to remain in service long enough to see your marque completed, you would be free and clear at the end of it. And there would be no suspicion cast on your Tsingani friends for having kidnapped a valuable adept.”

“Brother Caleb,” the adept said wearily, dragging the fingers of one elegant hand through his hair in a gesture that cried of training he no longer consciously remembered. “Brother Caleb of the Cassiline Order, with your holy vows of purity and piety -- how would _you_ like to be told that you needed to abandon your church and sell your delectable ass for the foreseeable future, because you happened to wake up one day wearing the wrong tattoos in the wrong damned town?”

“I can’t imagine,” he admitted.

The smile the adept gave him was thin-lipped and brittle. “Try. As a purely hypothetical exercise, try to imagine that for me. Go on.”

Not for the first time, Brother Caleb wished that Lucien nó Mandrake had been in service to any other House before his disappearance. If it had been Orchis, sworn to joy, or Jasmine, sworn to sensuality, he could have let the dowayne have this conversation with their wayward adept without a moment’s hesitation.

But even a Cassiline monk knew what was spoken about the dowayne of Mandrake House. One became a dowayne by exemplifying all that a House held in great esteem, and when Mandrake House’s canon was domination, when their motto was “ _Yield All_ ” -- no.

Brother Caleb was not going to inflict the dowayne of Mandrake House on an amnesiac innocent over whom the dowayne already had a reasonable claim of debt-ownership.

On the other hand, a Cassiline monk was possibly the worst person in all of Terre d’Ange to make a full-throated defense of the service of Naamah and those who plied sensual trades for their livelihood.

He opened his mouth, closed it, thought a second time, and then a third.

 _It isn’t meant to be slavery_ would scarcely help an adept who was subject to a contract that he had no memory of his past-self signing. _Love as thou wilt_ were fine words that the adept was in no position to choose freely under a life-debt not of his own conscious making.

“Blessed Elua, have mercy on us both,” Brother Caleb murmured, head bowed.

Blessed Elua’s mercy didn’t knock on the door; it pounded, more loudly than he expected. Grasping at the excuse, Brother Caleb hurried to open the door.

Blessed Elua’s mercy was also _bluer_ than expected. Still a beautiful sight, though; Jessica nó Orchis de Lavorre, the very dowayne he’d hoped against hope for, smiled up at him.

“Your pardon, Brother Caleb, it’s just that I heard a rumor that, that among the Tsingani performers, there was--”

And then she looked past him.

_“Lucien!”_

Brother Caleb barely managed to dodge in time. She threw herself entirely over the table and flung both arms around the startled adept, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Luci, where have you _been?_ We thought -- we didn’t know -- what _happened_ to you? Why didn’t you send word? We’ve been worried sick!”

Utterly taken aback, the adept put his arms around her to steady them both; stroking her hair gently, he touched her horns with trembling fingertips.

“There’s _more_ of us?” he breathed, shaken.

Jessica lifted her head sharply. “Luci? What are you talking about?”

The adept cast a desperate look at Caleb, then looked down at the dowayne of Orchis House with something that struggled on the edge of recognition in his face.

“You’re like me,” he said, and laughed a little, on the edge of tears. “I thought I was the only one.”

“You thought what?” Jessica asked, staring at him. “Why under heaven would you think that?”

“Darling, I don’t entirely know myself at the moment.” Swallowing hard, he added, “I’m -- I’m not who you remember. My name is Mollymauk of the Longest Road, and until a moment ago I thought I was the only one of our kind. May I ask your name in turn?”

“My -- ask my name--”

“Please.”

“Call me Jester. You always called me Jester -- I’m your _sister,_ you _idiot,_ ” she said, and burst into tears.

Faced with two tearful adepts, Brother Caleb fell back on caretaking reflexes he only dimly remembered from before his vows -- something about hot liquids, something about blankets, perhaps something about soothing sounds.

He shouted something incoherent about tea through the now-wide-open door in the direction of a startled novice, shook the dust off a decorative quilt someone had donated to the Brotherhood, and angled himself behind the quilt as though the huddled adepts were a pair of wild wolves rather than weeping newfound family.

Neither of them seemed inclined to bite. They were clinging to each other, heads bent close, murmuring to each other in a guttural language full of sibilants and snarls that made the hair on the nape of his neck stand on end. But no one was bleeding or screaming, so all in all Brother Caleb considered it good enough.

He crept a couple steps closer, awkwardly tucked the quilt around their shoulders, and stepped back.

Then he stepped forward and tugged at the quilt again, because Jessica -- Jester -- had caught one of the hems on her horn when she tried to look up at her brother. She managed a tearful giggle at his clumsy efforts to help. She was the dowayne of the house given to joy; somehow she made even the aftermath of tears look charming.

“Brother Caleb,” she said, twisting the end of the quilt through her fingers, “what in the name of Naamah’s mercy happened to my brother?”

He told the story for the fourth time, or as much of it as he knew: a vanished adept of Mandrake House who woke hundreds of miles away without any memory, the Tsingani who claimed to have taken him in, who claimed not to have known that the adept’s elaborate tattoos were technically incomplete. Looking at him, Brother Caleb could even believe that claim to be plausible enough, from far-traveling Tsingani only acquainted with the ways of the Night Court by distant rumor.

If Lucien nó Mandrake had been present, he would have asked him why an adept would spend so much of the marquist’s time and expense in _not_ completing the marque. But it was eminently clear that Lucien nó Mandrake was not the person sitting in this room.

“You mean to tell me,” Mollymauk said, “that this son of a -- your pardon, Jester -- that the _highly esteemed_ being who used to inhabit my body could have had these marks completed? He could have left his body _not_ in life-sworn debt to a house built of suffering, and he _didn’t bother?”_

“Oh, that’s easy,” Jester said. “You’re -- um. I mean, not you, Luci -- Lucien is -- was… oh, this is _so strange._ Anyway! Lucien was tweaking Mama’s tail. She wanted each of her children to become dowayne of their chosen Houses, and you -- I mean, Luci _could_ have, if he’d cared to, but that would have meant work, and math, and numbers, and all the boring things. But as long as his marque wasn’t finished? Well, then the House paid for all the essentials, and Lucien only had to take a patron when he wanted one. He didn’t need to work to keep a roof, to keep clothed and fed and comfortable bedding, he could pick and choose who caught his fancy. He didn’t want to finish; he had much more fun _not_ being fully marqued.”

Mollymauk stared down at her, and then turned an incredulously accusing stare on Brother Caleb.

“Why the hell did you NOT explain the whole sex-slavery thing to me _that_ way to begin with?!”

“I didn’t know!” Brother Caleb protested. “I’m Cassiline! I don’t know how Naamah’s Servants manage their houses and their -- their p-patronage--”

“Sex-slavery?” Jester echoed, appalled. “Lu-- Molly! It’s not -- that’s not -- You don’t remember _anything,_ do you?”  
  
“My dear, when the Tsingani found me, I didn’t even remember this language. All the words I had were in the tongue you call infernal.”

“...Well. From the beginning, then.”

Jester took his hands between hers, looking up into the face of a brother she’d known all her life, and a person she was meeting for the very first time.

“You and I are the servants of Naamah, who gave herself to the King of Persis for the sake of Blessed Elua’s freedom. Each House has their own way of thinking about how Naamah made the act of love into a divine gift -- I am sworn to Orchis House because I believe Naamah gave herself in joy. Is any of this the least bit familiar?”

“Not in the slightest, not until Brother Caleb told me much the same,” Mollymauk said, brows crooked together. “The Tsingani are not so strict with their tales of religion.”

“All right. So, they all argue their different reasons, but what every one of the Houses agrees upon is that love is a _choice_. The one commandment is _Love as thou wilt._ ‘As thou wilt’ is _your_ choice. Your decision whether to offer, whether to accept -- and also, how you choose to offer and accept.”

Clinging to his hands, clearly trying not to push too hard and distress him further, Jester said fervently, “What we do is sacred, brother. Not even Valerian House would allow themselves to be thought of as slaves, for all that their canon is submission.”

“And Mandrake House?”

“Your dowayne would utterly destroy anyone who made so much as an insinuation of that,” Brother Caleb said darkly.

“And he -- I mean, the person I used to be -- Lucien, he enjoys hurting people...?”

Jester bit her lip, looking up into his eyes for a hint of anything familiar there.

After a long moment, she told him, “I think that perhaps Lucien’s House is not your House.”

“That’s a choice I could make? Changing Houses?”

“‘Love as _thou_ wilt,’ big brother. Of course it’s your choice.”

“Bless all the heavens,” he breathed, relaxing a little for the first time since Brother Caleb had led the crownsguard into the circus tent. “All right. I can work with this. So. Next question: what kind of inexplicable political and financial intricacies will this place require when a person needs to change houses?”

Tilting her head a little, she said, “Right now, it requires me secretly buying your marque from Mandrake. I don’t know if Orchis is the _perfect_ house for you, but you need to _start_ with us. You need to rediscover joy, first, before anything else.”

“...You’re going to _buy me.”_

“Yep!”

“Sweet heaven, I thought the family drama among the _kumpanya_ was excessive. This, though? This is reaching new heights, darling. In what excessively politically tangled-up realm is it normal for people to _buy their family members’ sexually-repaid life-debts? "_

“Do you want to _stay_ indebted to Mandrake House?”

“Oh hells no!”

“Well, good!” Jester patted his hand comfortingly. “Don’t rush into finishing your marque -- as long as Orchis House owns your debt, Orchis House can protect us both. Now I just need to work out how to buy your marque without the dowayne realizing who I am, or he’ll try to bankrupt me just to make me kneel at his feet and beg.”

Mollymauk blinked at her for a moment, and then said plaintively, “And you say this is all _normal, civilized behavior_ in this town?”

“Well. Normal for the Night Court, I mean. Mandrake likes to make everyone squirm, and the more you need something -- and, well, he’d know I need it quite a lot, because you’re my brother and I love you and he would absolutely use that, which is why we need to work out someone who’s entirely trustworthy but also not too recognizably tied to Orchis as our go-between. But don’t worry -- I can afford you! As long as he doesn’t know why I’m asking, that is.”

“Why would you risk something like that for-- I mean--” With a tight edge under his voice, Mollymauk reminded her, “I’m _not_ your brother. I’m not your Lucien.”

“You’re not Lucien,” Jester agreed. “But you are still my brother, and I want to get to know you again.” Cupping a hand against his cheek and bumping their horns together lightly, she added, “That sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I love you already, because you’re still family, and I think I’m likely to like you too, because Molly seems like a kind person.”

The adept sighed softly. “I would like to get to know you as well, little sister. I just wish the circumstances were a bit less unequal -- I mean, you also seem like a kind person. But I’ve known you for perhaps five minutes and you’re talking about buying me under the table. I wasn’t born yesterday, dear.”

“Almost yesterday, though,” she said, teasing him a little.

“I’m nearly two, you know. I’d thought they were quite educational years, up until this afternoon.”

“Lucien disappeared three years ago,” Jester murmured. “I wish I knew what happened.”

With a shudder, Mollymauk replied, “I don’t.”

“Oh, you’re right, I -- I don’t think either of us wants to know details. But I wish I knew enough to protect you. Then and now.”

Brother Caleb smiled a little ruefully at the mental image of pretty, round-cheeked, ribbon-bedecked Jester -- or the much more formally-styled Jessica nó Orchis de Lavorre, Dowayne of Orchis House -- hoisting a battle axe twice her size. If someone threatened her House or family, though, he could well believe she’d find one.

“I especially want to make sure you _don’t_ somehow vanish again, and lose all your memories of Mama and me, and think you’re the only one of our kind left anywhere! I might never know for certain what happened, but what I do know is that Mandrake House failed you. Failed to protect you. And so did Mama, and so did I. But I promise you I _won’t_ fail you again.”

Mollymauk mimicked her gentle horn-bump, smiling down at her crookedly. “My valiant hero,” he said. “Is there any path through this tale in which the knight’s white horse and I ride into the sunset with the Tsingani, and tomorrow I dance to Moondrop’s tune under another carnival’s tent?”

Jester bit her lip, and looked down.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, as gently as he could manage. “I don’t intend to hurt you. I know you look at me and see your brother. But you’re also taking me away from the only family I have ever known. For you, it was three years. For me, it was my entire life.”

“If your marque were complete,” Brother Caleb said, “then there would be no rumors of a half-trained adept stolen from their House, and no obligation to repay. But right now, the next time a nobleman or a monk sees you, you’d likely face the same interrogation again. The next nobleman might think to make a pretty penny of it, ransoming you back to your House with a few blackmailing insinuations thrown in about the damage the unsupervised vagaries of a half-trained adept could do to your House’s reputation. That’s why I brought you in. So that someone else wouldn’t.”

Both of them turned to stare at him.

“I thought you said you didn’t understand House-things,” Mollymauk said.

“I don’t know the, um, the precise arrangements. I don’t know the intricacies of exchange of… er the various sorts of... favors? I mean, there’s thirteen Houses and they all handle things differently and they bristle like wet cats if you mistake one for another.” With a guilty glance at Jester, he added, “Begging your pardon, dowayne, but most of the details are beyond me. On the other hand, the Cassilines are a martial order in service to the noble families of the realm. We fight and die for other powers’ political gain. We do know politics, and the kinds of cruelty that skate along the edges of politics.” _And most of all,_ he thought bitterly, _I know the dowayne of Mandrake House._

Looking at him soberly, Jester said, “We need a go-between that Mandrake wouldn’t suspect to be bound to Orchis. I think we could trust you, Brother Caleb.”

He managed one sharp, brittle laugh, shaking his head. “If I could, I’d help you. But if he’d triple the rate for an adept’s family, Trent Ikithon nó Mandrake would quadruple that rate for me. He would burn half the city if he thought he would see me beg his mercy.”

“Little bit of history there, I’m guessing,” Mollymauk observed. “You know, I’m starting to think this dowayne chap might deserve an introduction to a really angry angel with a really sharp sword.”

“If you happen to know where we could find one of those, do pray enlighten us,” Brother Caleb said, a bit more tartly than he meant.

The adept leaned back, crossed his hands behind his head, and gave them both a smug grin a little too full of pointed teeth. “As a matter of fact, I do. Her name’s Yasha. The pleasure will be all hers, I think, because it’s almost never the other guy’s.”


	4. VIII. Strength: Yasha, daughter of Kushiel, the Angel of Punishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strength: Control of savage passions. Recognizing your inner courage through overwhelming crises. The tender-handed lion-tamer.
> 
> (Molly's angry angel is the best angry angel. But then, Molly's biased.)

_(Brother Caleb)_

 

The plan they devised together was far from elegant; there were more moving parts and more disruptable bits of magic than Brother Caleb was comfortable with. But when Mollymauk introduced them to Yasha, and she folded her impressive arms and glared down at them, all of a sudden Brother Caleb didn’t feel quite so concerned about sending an innocent into Ikithon’s lair.

“What do you mean, you’re _buying Molly?”_ Yasha growled.

“Mandrake House would be _awful_ for the person he is now,” Jester told her earnestly. “I never entirely understood what my brother saw in it when he was Lucien, but -- no, it’s not Molly’s type of place at all.”

“I don’t think you understand me,” Yasha said. “What do you mean you’re _BUYING MOLLY?”_

Brother Caleb thought, _And this is why I should have said ‘no, the Tsingani prisoners aren’t an option,’_ even as he loosened his blades in their sheaths and stepped a bit closer to Jester.

He could see the temptation in Molly’s face: the desire to let Yasha steal him free, ‘kidnap an adept’ in truth, and see how far they could run, if they were going to be treated as though they’d kidnapped him regardless.

“I don’t want to _own_ him,” Jester said. “I want to _help_ him! He’s my _brother._ I know he doesn’t remember that, but I do. Please. You’ve known him for two years, but I’ve known him all my life, and all that time when you thought he didn’t have anyone else waiting for him, I thought -- I thought my brother was…“ She gulped hard, and scrubbed away stray tears with an unsteady hand.

To Molly himself, she said, “Please. Just give me a little time. Let me get to know who you are now. And relearn what your joy in love means, and finish your marque. And when it’s done, if you want to go back to the road, then I won’t stop you. Because you’ll know what you’re choosing, then. But right now you don’t know me at all, not yet. Give me that chance. Let me reintroduce you to the rest of your family. The Tsingani are the family you chose, I know that -- but Mama and I still love you, too. She’d be devastated if she thought you never wanted to see her again.”

Molly gave Yasha a glance full of words that they didn’t need to speak aloud to share -- the kind of familiarity that, in another time, he might have shared with his sister instead.

After a quiet moment of thought, Yasha said, “Well, the first problem is the ickytown bastard, yes?”

Jester made an inelegant noise, and clamped both hands over her mouth.

Brother Caleb said a little wildly, _“Ikithon._ If you want to live, his name is Dowayne Trent Ikithon nó Mandrake.”

“Right, sure. How many pieces should he be in at the end of the conversation?”

“How many can you turn him into?” Brother Caleb asked despite himself, desperately intrigued.

“No, don’t, that’s a terrible idea,” Jester said hastily. “I mean. It’s also fantastic, but it’s terrible because that’s likely to end up with _Molly_ ending up in charge of a house full of political intrigue and sharp blades and doms and dommes and all the black leather and ...I mean, if you eventually decide that’s a life goal again, whatever makes you happy? But right now I really, really don’t think that’s where you want to start relearning our world.”

With a small sigh, Molly patted Yasha’s shoulder and said, “She has a point. I’d much rather wade in at the shallow side of the pond than dive in even further over my head.”

Yasha shrugged a little. “You lot will be talking in my head while I’m negotiating, right? If you change your minds on the number of pieces, I’m flexible.”

“Gods, I love you,” Molly said, leaning into her side; Yasha put an arm around him, and he clung a little tighter than his careless affectation of nonchalance would support.

Watching them, Jester said softly, “Yasha, are you and Molly…?”

“What? No! He’s _two,”_ Yasha said, indignant.

“Oh, not _everywhere,”_ Molly murmured, with insinuatingly arched brows.

“Your _head_ is two,” Yasha shot back, unimpressed. “You’re always going to be my little brother.” A heartbeat later, she remembered whom she was saying that in front of, and froze.

“No, I understand,” Jester assured her. “He’s always going to be my big brother too. I’m just trying to decide whether we should give Dowayne Ikithon the impression you _are,_ if he’d be more likely to agree.”

“Less likely,” Brother Caleb put in. “Other people’s emotions are blade-handles for him to twist.“

_“So_ much history there,” Molly said, looking at him sideways. “I’d almost guess you used to belong to his House, if you were a little less innocent.”

“It’s the other way around,” Brother Caleb said. “Years ago, before he was nó Mandrake, he was Brother Trent Ikithon, and he recruited me into the Cassilines. But then… um. The Order takes the vows of chastity seriously. But he…”

His throat closed up; Brother Caleb swallowed hard, and struggled to steady his voice. “He always had a taste for… for the arts practiced in Mandrake House. For _precisely_ inflicting pain.”

“All right, new plan,” Jester said. “Brother Caleb, you’re not going _anywhere near_ that man’s mind or hand. Not even magically. Mama or I should thought-shadow Yasha for the negotiations; we’ll know the contracts’ language better anyway.”

“I’m _not_ weak,” he insisted. “Whatever you need of me--”

“Naamah’s Mercy, no, you’re not weak,” Jester agreed. “But neither am I cruel.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Caleb said. “What matters here is that we reclaim Molly’s contract--”

“It’s _never_ irrelevant to find ways to not be cruel. We can reclaim Molly’s contract without hurting you too.”

Yasha and Molly traded another of those silent looks, and Molly smiled a little, crookedly.

“I’m starting to like your little sister,” Yasha agreed.

Jester glanced over, wide-eyed and pleased; but whatever she might have said was interrupted by the clatter of a tray of badly-balanced tea-wares.

“I am not your bloody fetch-toy, Caleb, the next time you want tea for visitors you fetch it your own damn self and _guh.”_

Hastily, Brother Caleb grabbed the tea-tray out of Sister Beau’s hands before she could drop it entirely at the sight of Yasha.

Yasha quirked a brow, crossing her arms across her chest. Groping blind for a chair before her knees could give out entirely, Sister Beau said almost reverently, “Holy _fuck.”_

_“‘Holy fuck’_ does seem to be quite the point around here,” Molly agreed, with a twist of snark in the sparkle of his grin.

Jester dug an elbow into his ribs on pure reflex, then yelped, “Sorry! Sorry, I forgot-- um.”

“No, it’s fine, I deserved that,” Molly said, rueful. “And I should get used to the thought of having more sisters, I think. How many of us are there?”

“There’s _lots_ of us,” Jester said, beaming. “You’re so not the only one, not anymore. I mean. The jewel-names are a little embarrassing, but that one poet just kept running with it and Mama decided any publicity was good publicity and, er, I didn’t tell you about that, did I? I’m sorry, I keep forgetting what you don’t know. But Yasha should know this too, in case Trent tries to use it in bargaining?”

Sister Beau made a small whimpering sound when Yasha shifted her focus over to Jester again.

“Mama’s proper name is Marian nó Jasmine de Lavorre,” Jester said to Yasha in particular. Caleb thought perhaps it was a little easier for her to tell things to Yasha the newcomer that her brother Lucien would have already known for years. “But there was a noble-born poet who fell madly in love with her, years ago, before any of us were born, and he called her the Ruby of the Sea in all his poetry. And then we came along -- Lucien and Lillith and me; I’m the youngest -- and, well, he continued the theme. Lillith is the Pearl of Winter; I’m the Sapphire of the Sky; you’re -- I mean, Lucien is the Blade of Obsidian when he’s a gem, or sometimes, um, the Painsinger. He has a reputation, even for Mandrake House.”

The expression on Molly’s face spoke volumes.

Wincing a little, Jester said, “He wasn’t like that with me. He’s my brother; we never needed to -- to practice that particular art of his with each other.”

“That’s a relief,” Molly murmured, and touched the curve of her horn gently. “I don’t know much, but I don’t think I could bear knowing my hands had hurt you.”

Jester threw her arms around him again, and clung to him tightly. Her shoulders hitched a little too sharply when she struggled for breath, and Molly held her with gentle care, rocking her back and forth as though she were a circus-child rather than a named and titled power of the realm.

“So Lucien’s reputation makes Molly more expensive to buy free?” Yasha asked quietly.

“That’s it exactly,” Brother Caleb sighed. “Ikithon might try to make an issue, to argue that Lucien’s reputation is more valuable to his House than the cost of his unmade marque alone.”

Sniffling a little, Jester mumbled against Molly’s vivid-colored coat, “Ordinarily, Lucien could have pointed out that he could complete his marque at any time, but he could have offered the opportunity for special commissions as part of the contract. Except, um, you’re so very _not_ Lucien. It wouldn’t be safe for you or your patron, to be untrained and offer the arts of Mandrake House. You’d need so much retraining to make it safe, and I don’t know how we could explain that away...”

“I’m a quick study,” Molly offered, carding fingertips lightly through his sister’s hair.

“Even at Orchis we train for years, and Mandrake even more so. No one is that quick a study. And I don’t want pain to be the first thing you re-learn of our world.”

“So what happens if we tell him I’m mind-broken and a bit useless for his purposes? Surely that makes me less valuable to him.”

Jester turned pale. “Naamah’s Mercy. _No._ When your marque is complete you represent the House who made it; if he thinks you don’t remember enough to wear that marque -- he could demand you be retrained, he could -- no.”

“So I need to stay well out of his sight as well? I can’t say that grieves me.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “I think… I don’t want to make this harder for you, Molly, truly I don’t. But I think if you can bear it, we should all ask Mama’s advice on how best to negotiate this. She’s played the game of power since before either of us were born. And also, I know how desperately she would want to see you alive and well.”

“Even if I don’t remember her?”

“Even then,” Jester said. “It would be kind to warn her that you don’t remember, but I know she’d give anything to see you again.”

Molly flicked another silent glance at Yasha, almost pleading.

“None of us would ever try to stop you,” Yasha told him. “She’s your mother. I understand that. Maybe more than you do, really. Maybe if you don’t understand that yet, then it’s something worth learning.”

Sister Beau said, “I’ve got to warn you, new guy: sometimes families are shit. But it sounds like you had a good one both times.”

Molly glanced at Brother Caleb next. “If our parole could extend that far, if I could… I... I think I’d like to meet her?”

“Of course,” he said immediately. “This too is _‘love as thou wilt.’”_

“Oh,” Molly breathed, and in that moment he looked oddly young. Brother Caleb thought that it might be the first time Mollymauk of the Tsingani _kumpanya_ had truly _heard_ what Blessed Elua’s one commandment meant.


	5. II. The High Priestess: Jessica nó Orchis de Lavorre, Dowayne of Orchis House, called Jester

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The High Priestess: The dreamer, the visionary, the holy inheritress of divine insight. The mirror that reflects what is true and unchanging since childhood’s purity. Instinct and intuition.
> 
> (Jester is in her element. Molly rather likes her element.)

Molly took a certain amount of pride in his cold-reading skills. He’d spent his conscious life traveling with a tight-knit family that made their living as a traveling carnival of wonders from town to town, weaving together art and artifice and just enough magic to tantalize, and then adding acutely honed expertise with sensing the types of stories that would sell to particular individuals as well as broader audiences. And although he was young in his mind’s years, there were some things his body and his instincts picked up as though he’d known them well before.

From what he’d learned of his body’s former inhabitant this afternoon, he didn’t want to think too hard about what his affinity for blades might have meant. He was almost sure the acrobatics were due to the Tsingani. He  _ was _ entirely sure his own appreciation for sex had nothing to do with Lucien; he’d never,  _ ever _ wanted to see his lovers frightened or hurting. And he sincerely hoped he couldn’t lay his knack for people-reading at Lucien’s feet, though it did seem likely to have been a skill an adept pain-giver would have needed near as much as a carnival’s fortune-teller did. 

But for everything he thought he’d learned of the world and its people in two years’ wandering the countryside with his Tsingani family, not a bit of it had prepared him for the intricate lunacy of what these people in the capital city considered highly sophisticated and politically refined behavior.

Every people-reading instinct he had told him that Jester was absolutely sincere in her insistence that in order to travel the city comparatively un-noticed, they needed to dress him up like their sister -- one of the few other beings with horns who was clearly known to be alive and well in the city and to have daylight-business with the dowayne of Jasmine House.

Meanwhile, every  _ situation- _ reading instinct he had told him that Jester was providing herself with a grand opportunity to make the Cassiline monks squirm in embarrassment, and maybe to see whether she could make her sort-of-brother and the tall angry angel squirm as well. 

Yasha could have told her about Molly’s general lack of embarrassment with the tale of the tapestry, but then Molly had no particular objections to watching Jester make the scruffy ginger monk squirm. Brother Caleb was particularly delectable when squirming. 

Even if Molly wasn’t a ‘properly trained’ adept anymore, he had his own appreciation of the arts of squirming and how closely adjacent it was to writhing, especially when wearing nothing but flowers. 

(The mental image of Brother Caleb wearing nothing but flowers and squirming in a person’s lap, followed by some both literal and figurative deflowering…? Mmmm, nice. Honestly, if it wouldn’t have given the game away, Molly might have encouraged Jester to run a little further with it.) 

As it was, when Brother Caleb’s little goblin friend returned from her message-trip to Jasmine House with a bundle that unrolled into snow-white silk velvets and pearl mesh, Molly immediately stripped out of every stitch of his clothes in gleeful anticipation.

Sister Beau made an almost wounded-animal howl of protest, spinning around with both hands clamped over her eyes; the little goblin girl shrieked and joined her. Brother Caleb was made of slightly sterner stuff, not flinching away as visibly -- but Molly would have bet a dozen gold marks that Brother Caleb had no idea how red his cheeks were.

Ah, goddess’ mercy, silk velvet was  _ glorious _ . He’d never worn anything so luxurious in his life. Stroking the cloud-soft fabric with a wondering hand, trailing his fingertips deliberately down his chest and hip and thigh with a little sound of bliss that turned Brother Caleb’s cheeks pink, Molly purred, “Little sister, you certainly know your way to a hedonist’s heart.”

Watching him with a rueful, faintly sorrow-tinged smile, Jester said, “You really aren’t like Lucien at all.”

“He’d have objected to a gorgeous dress like this?”

“He’d have objected to the white. The implications of purity and innocence.”

Molly shrugged a little. “I mean, for my own taste white’s a bit boring, but it’s a fantastic base to work from. If you’d let me overdye this about six or eight times and embroider a fistful of rhinestones on…?” 

He stroked his fingertips down the velvet again, just because he could, and Brother Caleb swallowed hard. Jester noticed too; it helped chase some of the shadows from her smile when she giggled. 

“I’ll give you your own velvet to decorate to your liking. Lili would be vexed with us both if her favorite gown came back to her peacock-colored. Speaking of which -- do you mind a touch of illusion? It had to be Lili because I haven’t the skill to hide the shape of your horns, but I do have enough glamourie to make you match.”

“Wield your arts as you will, my dear.”

Jester breathed magic into a small soft-bristled limner’s brush, and where she flicked it over his skin it turned his own vividly tattooed lavender hue into luminous, shimmering fire-opal pallor underlaid with veins of jade and embers and sunset. 

Staring down at his arms in astonishment, Molly said, “Our sister’s gorgeous, isn’t she. What damn fool of a poet named her for something so boring as a pearl?”

“Oh, pearl suits her too,” Jester assured him, flicking the brush over his cheeks and nose and grinning when he sneezed reflexively at the tickle. “She’s got layers she hides behind a shell of beautiful stone when she wants, and she chooses very deliberately when she’ll relax. Close your eyes for me?” 

After a couple of soft brush-flicks over his closed eyelids, Jester moved on to opal-dusting the curls of his hair and the spiral of his horns, adding in a voice not entirely as casual as she wanted it to be, “It might be a while before you see her relax. She, um. I think Lili understood Lucien more than Mama or I ever did, and, well. You’re someone new.”

“Honestly, my dear, that’s more than fine,” Molly assured her. “It’s only fair to let her re-learn who I am.”

“And to let you re-learn yourself, too,” Jester said almost-steadily, only barely missing her stroke as she brushed her magic over the nape of his neck and along the curve of his back. “I mean. Not Lucien, not if you don’t want, just -- there are other parts you might want to re-learn. Being part of our family. Part of our order. Part of our realm.”

Then she knelt at his feet, and Molly startled backwards despite himself.

With a small sharp laugh that wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, Sister Beau said, “You said he came out of  _ Mandrake House? _ You’re seriously going to need to re-learn about people kneeling at your feet, new guy.”

“Not unless you  _ want _ to,” Jester told him, with what Molly could already tell was more blind hope than actual heels-on-the-ground truth. “But for right now, let’s try for just enough practice to let me finish this?” She touched the curve of his bare calf, and looked up at him for a nod of permission.

Molly took a deep breath, and then another, and tried to tell himself  _ not _ to remember what this felt like. It helped to think of it as a carnival-rehearsal, or as a costume-fitting: something backstage, something not-entirely-real. 

He only realized he was digging his claws into the wood of the table-edge when Sister Beau said, “Easy on the furniture, pal.”

“Don’t let go just yet,” Jester warned him. “I mean. I’m going to bet your tail is still ticklish.”

Bloody hells, his tail was still  _ incredibly  _ ticklish. 

By the time she let him go, he was doubled up over the table, gasping with helpless laughter, and had clawed several spectacular gashes into the wood. 

Yasha was standing awkwardly a couple of feet away with a row of scrapes down her bracer that led him to guess she’d quickly learned  _ not _ to give him a hand to hold while he was convulsing in tickle-hysterics. Sister Beau and the little goblin girl were both doubled up with laughter too, but of the laughing and pointing at the tickle-victim variety.

Also, Brother Caleb’s cheeks were flushed almost as bright as his hair, which made it all worth it.

“Like what you see, hmm?” Molly mused, turning more deliberately to one side to show off the curve of his hip, dragging the instep of one foot up his calf, and trailing fingertips up the side-slit in his gown. 

To his absolute delight, he hit all three targets with that one shot. Sister Beau and the goblin girl began howling denials and making a production number of scrubbing their eyes; and as it turned out, Brother Caleb  _ could _ blush all the way to the tips of his ears.

With an imp’s most mischievous grin, Jester said, “Oh, you’re  _ so _ part of the family. Just don’t let Lili catch you doing that in her skin.”

The little goblin girl sidled over and said with badly-faked nonchalance, “So, how long does that skin magic last anyway?”

Jester blinked, and then knelt again to be closer to her eye-level. “Only about an hour, I’m afraid,” she said. “But I know all  _ kinds _ of pretty things to do with make-up and hair ribbons, and they last a lot longer. Would you like to learn about those, Nott?”

“Oh. Um.” She was as bad at hiding her disappointment as she was at hiding her interest, but she managed something like a smile anyway. “Sure, that’d be good. Some time when we’re not in such a hurry to hide the new guy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one kind of works for Flowers and Fun with Magic? The one I'd really wanted to post today is about 4 more chapters in, though. 
> 
> If by some miracle I get 4 more chapters written today, I might post that far. On the other hand, if two sentences of outline turns into another 20-page fraction of a chapter again... (sweatdrop.) I want to have something for each day of the festival-week!
> 
> If anyone would like to pre-read some things, please let me know? In a couple chapters I'm going to post some of what is either the best writing of my life or the worst writing of my life, because I pulled out all the stops and I can't tell whether I hit the mark or way, way overshot. Perspective-feedback would be awesome...


	6. III. The Empress: Marian nó Jasmine de Lavorre, Dowayne of Jasmine House, called the Ruby of the Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Empress: Generous, beautiful, loving. Sensuality, fertility, and childbirth. Abundantly sharing all the luxuriant fruits of passion.
> 
> (Homecoming: "“Forgive me, darling, I’m about to be rude. But your original brother was an imbecile.”)

_ (Molly) _

For all the preparation and fuss, the actual journey through the city to Jasmine House was almost boringly uneventful -- but then, that had been the goal; ‘eventful’ was too-close kin to ‘dangerous,’ ‘bloody,’ and ‘secret-exposing’. All Molly had to do was to sit quietly with the white cloak’s hood pulled forward while Jester smiled and waved to anyone who shouted a welcome toward their carriage.

Molly was at least creditable at his role, Yasha came by strong and silent naturally, and Nott the goblin girl was little enough that she could crouch on the floor of the carriage with her hood up and be mistaken for a blanket-bundle at a casual glance. If their cover had been blown on the way, it would have been on the heads of the two Cassiline monks. 

Both of them looked exceedingly monastic, and excruciatingly uncomfortable to be seen in the carriage of his sister, the apparently universally acknowledged mistress of the happy branch of the sexy-nun-cultists. (The holy prostitutes? Whatever these Naamah-servicing people were in non-cultist-type language, anyway.) 

To be fair, Brother Caleb looked uncomfortable about the carriage-company; Sister Beau looked uncomfortable about being too-close-but-also-not-close-enough to Yasha. 

At some point when he wasn’t portraying the silently-regal icicle-mistress of the sexy-nun-cultists, Molly was going to have to make some extra-innocent-sounding inquiries about whether the vows of chastity only applied to reproductive varieties of sex. Both to make Sister Beau howl and flail, and because he had a not entirely disinterested curiosity of his own regarding the answer. As long as he had the excuse of being the uninformed one, he was planning to milk it for every bit of hilarity he could.

Jester made a good show of the cheerful mistress’s poise while the carriage threaded its way through ancient, narrow streets; but as they turned up a hill, her smile turned rigidly fixed for a few long, tense minutes.

His voice would give him away, but his hand wouldn’t. Molly reached over and laced his fingers through the hand Jester had knotted in her skirts. She gave him a startled glance, then clung to his hand fiercely enough that he had to school his face carefully against a wince. His little sister was  _ strong _ .

Only when they turned under the arch of some richly fragrant white-flowering trees did Jester actually relax enough for Molly to regain some feeling in his numbed fingertips. With an almost giddy smile, she told him, “Welcome home.”

Jasmine House was oddly half-familiar, a vision of silks and jewels and drifting incense, a luxuriant riot of color and texture and sensation. Gazing around at the gem-glittering silk arches that leapt from flower-laden branch to branch along the path, Molly asked his sister, “We grew up here?”

She nodded. “Do you remember any of this?”

“Not ‘remember’ so much as ‘recognize’ -- it feels like it might have been dreamed up by a Tsingani princess. Like what we’d build if we ever found one place we loved best of all. Except that it’s never all in one place like this. You’ve gathered up a thousand sparks of beauty and a thousand sensual touches from across a thousand different nights’ dreaming.” 

“Mama is the best at what she does,” Jester said. “For all that Orchis is mine to care for now, Jasmine will always be my first home. Our first home.”

“I don’t  _ remember _ it _ , _ but…” Molly shrugged a little helplessly. “I feel like I  _ know _ it _. _ And Lucien left all of this behind to go and  _ hurt _ people? _ ” _

Jester nodded again, leaning against his shoulder to share support. “To… master people. People who wanted to be mastered. Pain is only one of their paths. But, no, Jasmine House wasn’t his heart’s calling.”

“Forgive me, darling, I’m about to be rude. But your original brother was an  _ imbecile _ .”

“Can I get a fuckin’  _ amen, _ ” Sister Beau muttered under her breath, gazing around at the enchanted lights. Surprised and oddly touched, Molly decided that he might need to be a half step kinder in his planned-for teasing.

Jester sighed softly against Molly’s bare shoulder. “I love him. I always will.” 

“...I know. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, and her jewelry chimed softly. “If I had to lose my first brother, then... at least I get to know my second brother too. And I’m  _ extra _ glad that my second brother is you.” 

“Oh, sweetling.” He bent and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head, blinking at tears he hadn’t expected. “If I have to lose my  _ kumpanya _ to see them safely free? Then I’m extra glad you’re my second sister too.”

The coachman reined the horses to a halt under a grand portico that would shelter lavishly-dressed nobles and adepts from inclement weather; Nott scrambled out and crouched under the carriage, as though fearful to be noticed.

“Hey, no. Nott, it’s all right. These are some of the nice ones.” Brother Caleb crouched next to the shadow with the glowing golden eyes, and cupped a hand to her cheek; she leaned into his hand almost despite herself.

“I need a drink,” she mumbled.

“You and me both, kid,” Sister Beau said, crouching next to Caleb. “Come on out. Anyone tries to start shit with you, I bet I can kick their ass. If they’ve got all those fancy silky dresses and shit on, I can  _ totally _ kick their ass. Just watch me.”

“But hopefully we won’t need anyone to kick any asses at all!” Molly offered brightly. “I’m told that’s the business of that other house, and I plan to be well quit of them.”

“None of us  _ belong _ here, not except the horny pair,” Nott muttered. “You two haven’t got a bloody clue what to do in a fancy whorehouse, they’d throw her out for a giant carnie-thief if they wouldn’t have to scale a bleedin’ ladder to get high up enough to try, and-- “ She dropped her voice further and hissed, “And I still bet they’d be pissed as shit if they figured out somebody else was wearing the pearl-sister’s skin.”

“Nott, honey, we can talk about this but  _ not right here, _ ” Jester said urgently. “You know Mama Ruby likes you. She makes sure to have candied chestnuts whenever she knows you’ll be by.”

“Your mama’s nice,” Nott admitted, huddling smaller. “It’s just the rest of the fancy pricks. That’s why I go in the attic window when I need to talk to your mama.”

“Come inside with us, honey, and we’ll get a nice private room and we’ll talk to Mama Ruby by ourselves. Just us.” 

“Just us? You promise?”

“I promise! We can braid ribbons in your hair if you want. I  _ promise _ it’s going to be okay, Nott. And if anything isn’t okay, Sister Beau and Brother Caleb will have to thumbwrestle to see who gets first ass-kicking rights!”

Nott’s eyes glittered like candlefire in the shadows. “Hold my hand,” she demanded. “Both of you.”

“Of course,” Brother Caleb said, but she shook her head.

“Those two. If that lot’s going to stare at me, they’re going to see me with the ones they  _ can’t _ throw out.”

“I’ll carry you myself,” Molly assured her, holding out both hands. “I’ll wrap you up in this velvet cloak and Jester will hold your hand and nobody will get you away from us. I bet you’ll like the cloak. It’s the softest damn thing I’ve ever touched, anyway. Come on, little bit. It’ll be fine.”

Jester shifted on her feet; Molly was starting to be able to read her through the mistress-mannerisms, and he was willing to bet she was about to mention how very un-Lillith it was to swear over velvet and carry around goblin-girls. It wasn’t going to make a bit of difference to his behavior if she did, though; he flicked his tail-tip in a sharp  _ no _ at her, and she settled back on her heels.

Something tipped the balance in Nott’s head, and she flung herself at Molly and clung like a limpet. Tucking an arm under her hips to steady her, he helped Jester find the girl’s hand amid the folds of the cloak, and the odd little troupe of them trundled awkwardly indoors.

He was so busy comforting Nott and following Jester’s lead, and avoiding the gaze of the courtiers who whispered to themselves and leaned away, and glancing back to make sure Yasha didn’t knock her head against any of the low-hanging chandeliers, that he’d almost forgotten to be nervous for himself. That is, he’d forgotten to be nervous until Brother Caleb closed a particular door behind them. 

And then Molly looked up at a breathtaking crimson-skinned woman who’d abruptly stood up from a velveted chair, and then he forgot how to breathe.

All of a sudden, Nott wasn’t the least bit frightened anymore. Beaming ear to ear, she flashed the beautiful woman a thumbs-up. 

“See, Mama Ruby, I promised we’d get just-us in here for you, and he’s not even freaking out or anything! ...Um.” Waving a hand in front of Molly’s stunned staring, she added a little dispiritedly, “He wasn’t freaking out a minute ago, anyway.”

Jester murmured something that snapped the bond of magic, and all the opal-sheen of Lillith’s borrowed skin dropped away. 

And then Molly really  _ did _ start to panic, because this woman ruled a house like something out of a Tsingani queen’s dream. 

If he’d walked up to a Tsingani queen in a borrowed dress and a borrowed  _ skin _ from a sister he’d never even spoken to, never even asked that sister’s help from his own lips? Barefoot and bareheaded and borrow-frocked and empty-handed and only barely out of prison, and even that by the grace of Brother Caleb’s lenience rather than any cleverness of his own, with penny-farthing cut-glass jewelry in his horns and all these garish-bright tattoos bared for his regal-looking mother and and all her nosy gossiping neighbors to see? 

And there was too much he simply didn’t understand about this mad place and his own markings. He’d gotten _his entire_ _kumpanya_ arrested because he’d stripped off his shirt for one midsummer night’s blade-dancing.

Put it all together, and a Tsingani mother would have boxed his ears and scolded him for a month solid, let alone a queen. She  _ had _ to think he was some kind of-- embarrassing, uncivilized, half-wild prison-escaping reprobate-- 

Nott cut through his frantic shame-scalded guessing-snarls with a solid cuff across his horns.

“ _ Don’t freak out _ . She loves you an awful lot, you twit,” Nott whispered into his ear. “Start with that instead. You and Brother Caleb, seriously, why are boys so dumb about people liking them?”

Then she climbed straight over Molly’s shoulder and jumped into Caleb’s arms, adding in a too-loud whisper, “Let’s us lot go be, like, in the other corner and all not-listening and stuff.”

Molly knew the curl of her horns from every single morning in his own mirror, and yet he’d never seen this woman before in his waking life. Except the words were wrong: she wasn’t a woman; she wasn’t a  _ human _ . She was  _ his own kind _ , and he didn’t even know the right words for her, for either of them, because a day ago he’d thought he was the only one in the world. 

...Well. He knew one of the right words. One of the right words was  _ mother _ . She even had his horns, or he had hers. She was so much like him, down to the dimple in her cheek, except that he was a madcap tatterdemalion disaster and she was the most strikingly regal person he’d ever seen.

And there were tears standing unshed in her eyes, and he’d put them there. Someone must have told her. 

Someone  _ had  _ told her, because she put on the most beautifully collected smile of welcome that he’d ever seen, and she whispered, “Molly?”

He didn’t remember moving, but three blood-rushing too-loud heartbeats later he realized it was her heartbeat he heard, because she was cradling him against her heart and they both were crying.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember, I’m not him--”

“I know,” she told him, stroking his hair over and over. “You’re  _ you _ . That’s all I need you to be. We’ll figure out the rest together.”


	7. VII. The Chariot: Sister Beauregard of the Cassiline Order, called Beau

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Chariot: Charging through a struggle with sheer force of will. Ambition. Libido. The result of aggressive behavior, for good or for ill. The drive to succeed.
> 
> (Sister Beau understands prioritization: "So if you hadn't just personally ruined his entire life, you'd tap that?" She also understands planning: She knows exactly how many pieces she wants Trent Ikithon in, and in what order.)
> 
> TW for profanity and Brother Caleb experiencing some panic and dissociation related to past events. Things get better in the next chapter though!

_(Brother Caleb)_

Sitting huddled with the rest of the group in a pile of shot-silk pillows and intricately hand-woven tapestries overstitched with real gold and freshwater pearls, Sister Beau’s hunched shoulder-blades kept twitching whenever the dowayne and her long-lost child caught their breath in either tears or laughter. Brother Caleb was sure she had no idea she was doing it.

“Are they still crying, or are they giggling now?” she muttered. “Naamah’s tits, I can’t stand it when people get all soggy.”

“They have three lost years to rediscover,” he told her. “Give them some time.”

“I am _not_ sitting here for _three years_.”

“No, but a few more minutes won’t kill you. Think of it as a meditation challenge.”

“Fuck off.”

“I thought we’d already agreed we’re not to each other’s tastes.”

“Fuck that too. Fuck everything.”

Yasha said in a tone of mild interest, “It seems that fucking everything _is_ more the standard around here. How did you become one of the monks that _doesn’t_ fuck people?”

“Fuck my entire _life,_ ” Sister Beau said with a groan, toppling over forwards into a pillow-pile with a dramatic face-first thump, and Nott giggled.

“Would you rather I explain?” Brother Caleb asked her, and she flipped him a profane sign with two fingers. He took that as a reasonably grateful sign of acceptance; if she’d actually disapproved, she would have tried to kick his head in.

“In the first days, when Blessed Elua and his companions ended their wanderings and settled in Terre d’Ange, each of his companions chose a land and a people of their own, except for one. The angel Cassiel chose not to bind himself to a land and a people; he lived in service to Elua alone, loving no other but his sworn lord and savior. Those of us who swear ourselves to the Cassiline tradition vow likewise. More mundanely -- we’re often second or third heirs of the minor noble houses who can’t entirely afford for their family lands to be divided among yet more heirs in the next generation. Sister Beau’s situation is ...unique, though.”

“Fuck unique _and_ the horse it rode in on,” she mumbled into a faceful of crimson velvet and pearls.

“Should I stop?”

“Just get it over with.”

Lowering his voice, he told the others, “Sister Beau is the only direct heir of the House Lionett. Her family… had certain expectations. Certain expectations that involved, er, more heirs to the bloodline, with, um, someone acceptably high-born and capable of the act of fathering. Not to her taste, on either front. If she’d sworn herself to Naamah’s Service, she would have been allowed the children her family could still have demanded of her. Jester’s family is evidence enough of that. In the Cassiline Order, though, Sister Beau would be forsworn. By the very nature of our vows’ restrictiveness, our Order was the only place where she could freely choose her own path. To love or refrain as _she_ wished, rather than as her family demanded.”

After a minute, Nott said, “Well, that sucks. Fuck all of them too.”

“Good kid, picking up my bad habits,” Sister Beau mumbled into the pillow. “I’m an absolute force of corruption, aren’t I.”

“You’re a force to be reckoned with,” Jester said, reaching over to rub her shoulders gently. Sister Beau froze for a moment; Jester leaned a little more pressure into the almost-massage, and Sister Beau went bonelessly limp with a small sigh of gratitude.

“Also,” Jester said serenely, with just a hint of wickedness tugging at the corner of her grin, “if the pair of you would ever like to discuss exactly how far a Cassiline monk _can_ go without being forsworn, I have compiled a collection of extensively cross-referenced illustrative guides, reviewed and annotated by some very wealthy lawyers. In the event you might ever wonder. You know, hypothetically.”

“Hell yes!” Sister Beau said, and then turned her head to blink over at Jester’s knee fuzzily. “Wait, the pair of who now?”

“Whichever pairs you like, of course. Both pairs, even. My tutoring schedule is flexible.”

“Wait, both pairs of what?” Brother Caleb asked, because he’d been confident Jester had meant Beau-and-Yasha up until the conversational road had forked in ways he hadn’t expected.

All four of the women looked at him, and then at each other, and then burst into giggles.

“No, seriously, what?”

“Caleb, sweetie,” Jester said, “your game-face would be a lot more solid if you didn’t blush so hard when a gorgeous adept strips naked in front of you.”

“...You mean _Molly?_ ” With an incredulous laugh, Brother Caleb shook his head sharply. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous that a holy Cassiline brother such as yourself might find temptation in an adept of Naamah? Or is it that my brother and I are so clearly of the Fallen Companion’s lineage?” Jester asked, tracing the curve of her own horn with a not-at-all-idle fingertip. “Mother and I never lack for d’Angeline patrons, you know.”

“That has nothing to do with it! It’s -- where do I even start?” Counting the points on his fingers, Caleb said, “In all probability he’s the victim of a crime that came a hair’s breadth from murder, because no living person remembers what Lucien nó Mandrake once knew. For all that I respect how much Mollymauk has rebuilt for himself in the past two years, he has as much effective lived experience as a toddler. I’ve just torn his world in half over d’Angeline religious and social politics he knows nothing of, due to the shadows of a past marked on his body that he remembers nothing of. I’ve used the law of a land he barely recognizes to isolate him from his _kumpanya_ and drive him back into the grasp of a binding contract he believed to be sex-slavery. Should I go on? The only kindness I’ve managed in this entire mess is to reintroduce him to his blood-kin, and that was much more your gift than my own. Honestly, I’m stunned he’ll even speak to me.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Sister Beau drawled. “But if you _hadn’t_ just personally ruined his entire life, you’d hit that?”

“Why would I hit him? Haven’t I done enough harm already?”

Sister Beau shoved her face into a pillow to try to stifle the howls of hilarity. Jester was biting her lip entirely too hard.

“I’m gonna tell him,” Nott said, with a wickedly snaggletoothed grin.

“Don’t tell him,” Yasha said, lips twitching.

“No, we gotta tell him.”

“Let me guess: yet another sexual reference of some sort,” Brother Caleb sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sister Beau, I am compelled to observe that you are _the worst monk ever._ ”

“Totally taking that as a compliment. I’m number one! Kickass!” Rolling over to grin at Brother Caleb upside down, she added, “I knew you were touched in the head, I just didn’t know how much. I mean, I’m really gay, but I’m not blind. That body is a work of art even before the tattoos. And I’ll kill you dead if you ever tell him I admitted that out loud. If you’re into dick at all, how can you _not_ want to tap that?”  

“Brother,” Jester said. “Sorry, Beau.”

“Same,” Yasha said. “Also, toddler.”

“Ikithon’s apprentice,” Brother Caleb muttered.

“You already know he doesn’t remember a damn thing of that.”

“Not him. _Me._ ”

“Oh,” Beau said, and thought about it for a minute, and grimaced. “Oh, fuck. Sorry. Does it help any that we all know I’m an asshole?”

“I don’t understand,” Jester murmured.

Brother Caleb opened his mouth, to try to explain, but his throat was knotting shut again.

“My turn for the talking,” Sister Beau said, almost gentle, and he managed a jerky nod.

“You know how Ikithon was a Cassiline monk before he _officially_ found his life’s calling making people pay him to beat them until they scream for mercy and thank him for it after? You want to guess how he found that life’s calling, and why the Cassilines threw him out on his ass?”

“Oh, _no,_ ” Jester whispered, hands clasped over her lips. Caleb bent his head sharply, because he couldn’t bear the sight of sympathy he didn’t deserve.

“You’ve got the general idea. But think about it. The way that shit works, Ikithon couldn’t have done it alone. Like, by definition, there was always gonna be someone else involved. _Someone_ had to be his... um. ‘Apprentice’ is one word, yeah? ‘Target’ is another.” Scowling like a thundercloud, Sister Beau added, “He wrapped it up in holy words; he called it fancy things that made it sound like penance, like training, like it was deserved--”

“I deserved it,” Caleb whispered, distant, through the silently screaming fog closing over his mind. His mind was scrabbling over remembered panic, and he could smell the smoke and the searing.

“Bullshit,” Sister Beau said, almost kindly. “Nobody _deserves_ Trent Ikithon. You know that, when you’re talking about anyone but yourself -- and trust me, kid, you’re not _that_ special.”

Nott climbed into his lap and pulled his arms around her like a cloak, stroking the backs of his hands, a small warm breathing reminder of comfort. He loved her more than his own life, right then.

“Anyway, the point is bookworm here’s got more than the usual Cassiline reasons to be twisty in the head about sex. Especially sex with men in power-imbalanced ways. And it’s a dick move teasing him about it, except we’ve established I’m an asshole.”

“His master is the man who owned Molly, before he was Molly?” Yasha asked.

“Yeah.”

“He did this to Molly too?”

“I mean. I can’t swear to it, but I wouldn’t be a damn bit surprised. Molly’s probably lucky he doesn’t remember.”

Watching Caleb struggling to breathe through steady eyes, Yasha said to Beau, “How many pieces do you want him in?”

“Thirty-one,” Sister Beau said, immediately. “Take his fucking hands apart joint by joint before you cut off his dick, then his head.”

“Done.”

“My Goddess, you are _so fucking hot,_ ” Sister Beau breathed.

Running both hands through her hair and down her face, Jester said almost plaintively, “Remember, we have to do this in the proper order.”

“Easy enough; Sister Beau has identified the proper order,” Yasha said.

“I mean, we _have to get Molly’s contract from him first.”_

“Why?”

“He has to sign it!”

“All right,” Yasha said, mildly. “Contract, _then_ fingers, then dick, then head.”

“And we have to find him a successor who’s not Molly but also not insane.”

“Now you’re just making shit up to make it harder,” Sister Beau complained, swatting at her with a pillow.

“Trent Ikithon never formally named his Second, but Lucien nó Mandrake served that role at his side more often than any other,” Jester said doggedly. “When my brother vanished, Trent never allowed another to take that place frequently enough to be acknowledged. The closest it came was Vesh, and… um.”

“And Vesh is a fucking lunatic who thinks he’s the god of edgelords,” Sister Beau groaned, scrubbing both hands over her face. “Fine, point to you.”

“I thought you were a monk,” Nott said skeptically. “How do you know so much about sex and whores and assholes? Caleb hasn’t got a clue.”

Like it was a badge of pride, Sister Beau proclaimed, “Worst monk ever!”

“The point is, we _have_ to find someone else to succeed him,” Jester told them. “Publicly, he said he held out hope for Lucien’s return. Privately, when the closest thing he had to an acting Second was Vesh, no one else in the house could just knife them and take over. Everyone would be angling for power in the void. We have to get him to identify a _competent_ successor before anyone kills him, because I am _not_ abandoning Molly in the middle of that mess to have to clean up everyone else’s power-wrangling by himself.”

“So, two contracts, fingers, dick, head. Got it.”

_“Nnnngh,”_ Sister Beau said.

“Darlings,” the Ruby of the Sea said from behind Jester, “you’re all still thinking too small. ...Is Brother Caleb unwell?”

“He, um, he panics sometimes,” Nott said. “Particularly about, uh, Yasha’s ‘Mr. Ickytown.’ Don’t walk up behind him. Don’t touch his back. Sometimes people help, sometimes they don’t.”

“All right,” Molly said, and sat down so close to Caleb that he could feel the heat of the adept’s body even through the numbly screaming fog-haze that isolated his mind from the rest of the world.

A moment’s soft rustling later, something body-warmed and unbelievably soft touched his temple, then his arm, then spilled into his lap beside Nott. Then it stroked against his throat, softer than a mouse’s fur and paler than clouds.

Caleb blinked, and struggled to focus on Molly’s beautifully-tattooed hand and the stunning silk velvet cloak that he smoothed delicately along the back of Caleb’s arm.

“My sweet child,” the Ruby of the Sea said, placing a gentle hand atop her son’s. “Your kindness is a generous gift. But I think perhaps Brother Caleb might not wish to hear some of the things I am about to propose to you.”

“Don’t coddle me,” Caleb said, from somewhere oddly far away. “I was his apprentice.”

“Brother Caleb, you and my son were both his victims.”

“I made my choice.”

“So did Lucien, once. Would you ask Molly to suffer for that choice as well?”

“ _No,”_ Caleb said sharply, staring down at the dowayne’s hand because he couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. “In Elua’s name, no. Not if there were anything I could do to prevent it.”

“Then you understand how I feel,” the Ruby of the Sea told him gently.

“My lady dowayne -- Molly is innocent of all of this. I am not. But I’m still a weapon. Don’t coddle me. _Use_ me. Let me be good for _something._ ” Bitterly, he added, “I’m particularly skilled with pain.”

“He’s full of shit,” Nott said. “He’s never hurt me once.”

“Ask Molly, then!”

Molly trailed fever-warm fingertips through Caleb’s hair, and said, “I call bullshit too, you know. Nothing you’ve done today was _intended_ as harm.”

“But I’ve torn your life apart without even _trying!_ ” Caleb protested.

“Be glad you weren’t trying. You still have your tongue,” Yasha informed him, calm as steel. “If I’d thought you _were_ trying to hurt Molly, I’d have removed it hours ago.”

“Wield each according to their own talents, then?” the Ruby of the Sea mused, and glanced at Sister Beau. “The two of you are Cassiline. You serve and protect the children of Elua’s Companions. Would you also serve and protect those of us who are the children of the Companion who fell?”

“I have fallen, myself,” Caleb said, staring fixedly down at their entwined hands, sunset-rose and twilight-amethyst, and Nott’s glittering golden eyes. “It is not my place to judge. It is mine to guard, to protect, and to obey.”

“And you, Sister?”

“The angel Luxifel was Blessed Elua’s brightest treasure, once,” Sister Beau replied, unusually sober. “And Trent Ikithon was born to Shemhazai’s so-called unfallen line. And I know which of you I would guard and protect and obey, and which clawed his soul-stuff straight out of a hell-pit.”

“You have my gratitude,” the Ruby of the Sea said, regal as a queen. “There are others of your order who have responded otherwise.”

“Yeah, well, fuck them too,” Sister Beau scowled.

"Well spoken, my dear,” the Ruby said, smiling; she had Molly’s dimples. “Sister Beau and Brother Caleb: Will you guard my children as you would the princes of the realm, through whatever storms may come of that which we plan here today?"

"On my life, my blades, and my honor," Sister Beau said, fist to her heart, without a hint of mockery.

"I... on my life and my blades," Caleb said, faltering. "And I leave it to you whether you would value my honor."

"My boy's got one thing right," Nott whispered too loudly, in nobody's general direction. "He's a terrible judge of people. ‘Specially when he’s the people."

The Ruby of the Sea curved a hand to Caleb's cheek, and gently urged his chin up just far enough that he could see her eyes: blood-scarlet, just like Molly’s; kind and warm, like both of her children.

"I have no fear of a failure of your honor," she said. "Tell me, is there a third member of your Order with whom you would trust my children's lives? For this to truly succeed, we'll need to involve Lillith as well."

"Brother Fjord," Sister Beau said immediately. "Biceps of steel, heart of pudding. Also knows a thing or two about living while colorful around here."

"I hope Lillith can forgive what I've done to her beautiful velvet," Molly said, looking ruefully at the crushed silken fabric pinned under his thigh and tangled indiscriminately around Nott and Caleb. "How much do you think she'll shout at me?"

"That, dear, is exactly why we need her. Because one of us has to be Lucien to sign the contract, and -- Molly, my darling, I adore the joyful and charming person you are now. But if we tried to pass you off as Lucien, you'd not fool Ikithon for longer than a breath."

The blend of utter relief and indignant offense tangled together in Molly's face startled an honest laugh out of Caleb.

"Lili always did understand him best," Jester said. "But I don't want to hurt her with this. Maybe I could..."

"No, sweetheart, you really couldn't." Patting her hand, the Ruby of the Sea added brightly, "Besides, we need you to be the Tsingani blade-dancer."

"Uh. Wouldn't Molly be the best at that?" Sister Beau pointed out. "Just saying."

The Ruby of the Sea smiled like a cat with a full bowl of cream. "But we need to establish that the Tsingani blade-dancer is neither Lucien nor Molly; we need that person to have had a different body all along, you see. We can't get ahead of the rumors, it's too late for that, but we can certainly muddy the waters. Speaking of which: Molly, dear, how would you like to be green for a while? It's one shade a child of mine could never be."

Staring at his mother in consternation, Molly said, "Let me get this straight. You're going after a vicious evil mastermind armed with a dimple-grin and the bloody _shell trick?_ "

"Oh, not at all, love; that's the grist for the rest of the city’s rumor mill. No, we’re simply _starting_ with the shell trick."


	8. XIV. Temperance: Brother Fjord of the Cassiline Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Temperance: The sky-winged, fire-crowned angel that stands poised upon the verge where all worlds meet: one foot grounded, the other testing the waters that flow far from the volcano’s immoderate eruption. Moderation, caution, a taste of truth from every perspective. The adept dancer who finds a balancing-point in any element. 
> 
> (“Howdy y’all, I’m Brother Fjord,” the Fjord who was obviously Sister Beau said. “Don’t let the green and the muscles scare you, I’m about as vicious as a kitten. Also don’t give me your good blades because I’ll _eat them,_ what the _actual fuck,_ Fjord...”) 
> 
> (The shell game, impersonation style. Brother Fjord is more multi-talented than the jewels of the Night Court knew. To be honest, he hadn’t quite wanted them to notice.)

_(Molly)_

When he’d been much younger and more naive -- say, two days ago -- Molly had thought the Tsingani saying “May you live in interesting times” to be meant as a blessing. Interesting times were surely better than dull ones, after all.

Now that he was bitter, wisened, jaded, and all of two days more elderly, Molly was avidly repenting his misspent youth’s ignorant bliss. Interesting times were a bloody _nightmare_.

Two days ago, he’d thought he would spend a week blade-dancing outside this big city’s fancy walls, get back on the wagon, and travel on to the next town with his _kumpanya_ as one of their carnival’s curiosities: the only demon’s child in all the realms.

Last night he’d gotten his entire _kumpanya_ arrested for dancing shirtless with the wrong tattoos, and thought he’d spend a week in jail and plead his ignorance and then travel on to the next town with his _kumpanya_ as one of their carnival’s curiosities: the only poor son of a bitch unlucky enough to have gotten himself body art that was somehow hazardous by association.

This morning, he’d met a half-mad ginger monk with completely irrational ideas about the religious and political significance of said hazardous-by-association body art; developed a completely justified but obviously unenforceable life-grudge against his body’s previous owner; and thought he’d spend the next six months to a year selling his ass for the money for whatever these people considered _properly_ completed tattoos.

And then his sister had crashed through the door and tackled him headlong. And then things had gotten _really_ interesting.

The Molly of today wanted to reach back in time and grab two-days-ago-Molly by the throat and shake him while shouting into his face, “You have three and a half true-seers in your _kumpanya_ , you idiot! Why the everloving fuck did you not see this coming last week and _run the other godsbedamned direction?_ ”

The hell of it was, the Molly of last week _had_ read _Interesting Times_ in the Six of Swords, the Eight of Wands, and the bloody Wheel of Fortune, and he’d been _delighted --_ thinking they’d find opportunities for patronage in the wealthy City of Elua, or some such nonsense. He was half a true-seer, sure enough -- and the wrong damn half of one at that.

Though, in fairness to himself, he didn’t think _any_ card deck could have spelled out a warning along the lines of “a week from now you will be wearing your sister’s best velvet dress while sitting on the floor nibbling at a prince’s repast with your mother the empress of sensuality, her daughter the high priestess of laughing sex, the best angry angel, the best goblin, and several insane holy-virgin knife-fighters, including the worst monk ever. All of whom are planning a city-wide sorcerously-enhanced horned-folk shell-game intended to lay the foundation for extracting the contract for a sex-debt your previous body-owner owed to some literal bloody lunatic, somewhere, somehow, fuck it all I need more brandy.”

Fortunately, there _was_ more brandy. (Mostly because Nott preferred the whiskey.)

Playing the game of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” with three Night Court adepts and three Cassiline monks was also _really_ not going the way he would have predicted from the label alone.

For one thing, he’d stripped to the waist and then _stopped_.

For another, his mother and his sister were the ones running their hands over his half-naked body. Jester was tracing the linework of the tattoos that spiraled down his arm and up his cheek, and Marian (it still sounded wrong to call his mother Marian -- maybe Mama Ruby, like Nott and Jester said?) followed the patterns across his back.

For a third, watching three monks fail spectacularly at impersonating each other was a lot more entertaining than Molly would have guessed, even with all their clothes on.

“Howdy y’all, I’m Brother Fjord,” the Fjord who was obviously Sister Beau said. “Don’t let the green and the muscles scare you, I’m about as vicious as a kitten. Also don’t give me your good blades because I’ll _eat them_ , what the _actual fuck_ , Fjord...”

The Fjord who was obviously Brother Caleb said, “ _Seriously?_ You’re not even trying.”

“Yeah, well, at least I can _strut,”_ Sister Beaufjord shot back. “You tiptoe around like a mouse. Go on, Fjord, show him how to strut.”

“I, erm,” Brother Actualfjord said, rubbing his fingertips together. “I didn’t think I strutted that much?”

“You don’t. She just can’t _not_ strut,” Brother Calebfjord said.

“You’re both just jealous of my awesomeness!”

Nott banged a spoon against an intricately carved silver plate and declared, “ _FAIL!”_

“Fail,” Yasha agreed.

“Let’s try just Fjord and Caleb,” Jester said, looking up from tracing the peacock-tattoos that trailed up Molly’s shoulder and cheek. “Come over here and watch, Beau; you know them better than we do.”

Sister Beaufjord grumped her way over and flopped dramatically on the pile of pillows; the other two ducked behind the floor-to-ceiling curtains that separated off the dowayne’s dressing-room, and after a moment, they came back out one at a time.

One of them leaned on the end of his staff; the other one fidgeted with the cuff of his sleeve.

“Well, _say_ something,” Sister Beaufjord demanded.

They traded a look in near unison, and one scratched behind his head sheepishly.

“After you, darlin’,” the pole-leaner said.

“Thanks awfully,” the ear-scratcher said. “Now I’m self-conscious about _everything_.”

“Do I really say ‘howdy’ that much?” the pole-leaner said, and Nott grinned with all her teeth.

“Good save, guys. Keep going.”

“You reckon we’re really gonna need to talk that much while we’re guardin’ someone?”

“We don’t know when we’ll meet someone who really knows us,” the pole-leaner said.

“And that one’s Caleb,” Molly declared, grinning. “Good try, though!”

“No it isn’t,” Brother Actualfjord said.

“Yes it is. The diction was too crisp on ‘we don’t know’; he’s northeastern, he neglected the Siovalese drawl. It would have been closer to ‘dunno’ from you. And there’s no way Brother Caleb would have come up with ‘you reckon’ without a few more hours’ practice purposefully mimicking you. But ‘do I really say howdy that much?’ _was_ quite a nice save.”

Scrubbing a hand through his hair, Brother Actualfjord said, “You’re sure that’s not magic, Molly? You’ve known me for, what, ten minutes?”

“Brother Fjord, I’m raised Tsingani; I see these things in ten _seconds_ ,” he said. “Yasha and I traveled all the known world in the _kumpanya_ of Moondrop the Dreamspinner, hearing all the accents, reading the palms and cards, but mostly reading the people. Palms are best of all; I’m holding their hand, I can feel the slightest reactions.”

With a glance at the women around him, he added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if your House-kindred pick up similar instincts. Professional safety.”

“Not exactly?” Jester said. “I mean, reading emotional reactions, certainly, and I’ve usually got a lot more than a palm’s worth of skin contact to work with! But the accents, the particular places -- Mama and I have never left the City. We have a general understanding of the realms and dialects, but I couldn’t tell you which village Brother Caleb came from.”

Brother Calebfjord opened his mouth, and Brother Actualfjord put a hand over it, with a broad grin.

“So tell us, Professor Molly, where _is_ Brother Caleb from?”

“Oh, that’s just cruel,” Nott said gleefully. “I approve.”

“How precise must I be to pass your challenge?”

“Nearest city.”

“That’s cheating,” Molly declared, tail twitching in vexation. “There isn’t one for at least two days’ travel, and Troyes-le-Mont is much too far southwest. The best I can do is about a thirty-mile radius of the Rhenus crossing near the Azzallese-Camaeline border -- one of the hill-forts or valley-farms, not a river-town itself. He’s got to be fluent in both Skaldian and Camaeline, though he’s worked hard enough to hide it under that highly-educated City-of-Elua dialect that I couldn’t tell you which was his native tongue.”

“Now that’s just eerie,” Brother Actualfjord said, looking back and forth between them.

“If there _is_ any true magic under it, it’s nothing I’m casting on purpose. Yasha, what’s your take?”

She shrugged a little. “About what you’ve got. Maybe a little more. What’s your monks’ age of initiation around here? Fourteen?”

“Younger than that,” Molly said. “A celibate order? They’d want to catch them before they mature enough to figure out what a sex drive is.”

“Crass and yet entirely accurate,” Sister Beaufjord said, and then a nauseated expression crossed her Fjord-face. “Oh, bloody hells, I think I’m starting to like this purple brat.”

“So why does the initiation age matter?” Jester asked.

“For anybody else, it probably wouldn’t,” Molly said. “But I think Yasha has a rabbit to pull out of her cap. Is it cheating to ask Brother Caleb how old he was?”

“Totally cheating,” Nott said, with an extra toothy grin. “Show me the rabbit. Rabbits are tasty.”

“Not that type of rabbit,” Yasha said, and looked at Brother Calebfjord speculatively. “What do you call the bridge across the Rhenus just west of Trevillion?”

Brother Calebfjord glanced at Brother Actualfjord, who removed the hand over his mouth and made a gesture of invitation.

“Um. Saarbrege?”

“You’re from a few miles past the Camaeline side of the border, apprenticed somewhere around ten to twelve years ago, and if you were ever at the Troyes-le-Mont Cassiline monastery, you weren’t there for more than a month,”  Yasha said, with a hint of a satisfied smile. “How did we do?”

“Most of that, yes, exactly,” Brother Calebfjord admitted. “I had about three months in Troyes-le-Mont before we were transferred to the capital, but, um. I didn’t talk to people very much.”

“This is my surprised face,” Sister Beaufjord announced flatly to the ceiling.

“How did you get that out of Saarbrege?” Molly asked, delighted. “I’ve only heard it called Pont-de-Sarre.”

“Magician’s secret,” Yasha said.

“ _Yaaaaaaashaaaaa.”_  Molly put on his best wheedling eyes. Whether to indulge the wheedling or to avoid the whine, she indulged him.

“It’s Saurbreke once you get into Skandia, and Saarbrij further north towards Azzalle and the Flatlands. About eight or nine years ago there was a territory dispute on the Skaldian border and someone decided to replace all the way-posts with the d’Angeline Pont-de-Sarre. Political pride or something. So now the people up there will tell you Pont-de-Sarre if you’re speaking d’Angeline. But they still use their own names with each other, especially in their own dialects.”

“You got all that from one word,” Brother Actualfjord said, looking bemused.

“We’re Tsingani; we understand a thing or two about in-group languages.”

“Hello, competence kink I did not know I had,” Sister Beaufjord muttered under her breath. “What about Troyes-le-Mont?”

“Troyes-le-Mont is deep into Namarre. They’ve called it Pont-de-Sarre for centuries. If the city-children don’t tease the country-children about their words, I’ll eat that shoe. So he wasn’t there long enough to be made self-conscious of it.” With an idle flick of Molly’s nearest horn-ring, she added, “You’re just too young to remember the old way-posts, toddler.”

Molly stuck his tongue out at her, which likely did him no favors for any implications of maturity.

“I still figure it’s Tsingani magic somehow,” Brother Actualfjord said.

“This is circus-magic,” Molly said. “The magic of sharp eyes and clever wits, maybe. But there’s more to proper Tsingani magic than that. We’ve known tea-leaf seers who can tell you what street not to cross six months from now, and palmists who can name your nemesis without even a cold-read first.”

Yasha shot him the sidelong skeptic-glance of _and sometimes you’re one of them, and you’re not mentioning that?_

His mother and sister were too close to his eye-line, and too clever themselves; Molly flicked his tail in a sharp diagonal slash, a distinct _no go._ “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine” didn’t necessarily include _everything,_ after all.

“All right, wise-eyes, read me next,” Sister Beaufjord said, standing up to stretch with a bit of a wobble. “Gonna miss being six inches taller, but I want my own balance-points back. Can you do us up again?”

“Of course, my dears,” Mama Ruby assured them, smiling as she flicked a little puff of magic over the three Cassilines.

(It was still shivery-strange and heart-twisting to see his own dimples in another person’s smile, under another head crowned with his own horns. All his life, all two years of his knowing-life,  he’d thought he was the only one.)

“Excellent,” Sister Actualbeau declared, grabbing both of her new twins by the arm and dragging them all behind the curtains for a quick shell-game.

It honestly didn’t take much to identify Brother Calebbeau. The three of them pushed back the curtains together, arms locked at the elbows, but the expression of faintly panicked misery gave away the one in the middle immediately. Still, Molly wanted to give him a sporting chance. And from the look of Nott’s grin, she wanted an excuse to point and laugh some more.

“Okay, first challenge: Tell us how you really feel about something that pisses you off!"

“I hate the entire fucking world right now,” Brother Calebbeau said, with utterly devastating sincerity. It might have gone some fraction of a step toward being convincing if he hadn’t stumbled over the profanity. Both of the other Sister Beaus doubled up howling with laughter.

“Fail!”

“I damn well mean it!”

“Better!” Molly said, wanting to encourage him where he could.

“Still a fail though,” Jester said, giggling. “Come on, Caleb, honey, come sit with us.”

“Don’t let him off that easy, this is fuckin’ hilarious,” one of the Sister Beaus said, and Molly sat up straight, then winced when Jester poked him in the ribs with the stylus for disturbing her tracing.

“Sorry, Jester. Beau-the-first, say that again?”

“The true art of profanity is _improvised,_ ” the other one said loftily. “Fluidity. The inspiration of the moment. A leaf on the wind. Which is to say: fuck no, wise-eyes-guys, find yourselves a different trick-shot.”

The first one offered her a high five over Caleb’s head. “Nicely said, soul sister. We’ve got a problem, though: this whole country is too weak to handle the combined force of awesome that is _two_ of us.”

“Oh, _outstanding,”_ the second one said, returning the high five. “I like the way I think.”

“Someone please make them stop?” Brother Calebbeau begged.

“Not until someone can tell us apart!”

“Nobody told _us_ Brother Fjord was such a good mimic!” Jester protested, laughing.

“Nobody told us that at all,” Molly agreed, considering.

Sister Beau’s accent was pure Navarre midlands with a hint of upper-class intonation, reasonably close to the City of Elua itself; Brother Fjord would have had hundreds of examples of sound-models like that over the years.

Hiding his own Siovalese drawl that close to completely, though? Sharpening the _don’t_ because Molly had pointed it out in Caleb, and only slipping a breath on that first sentence? That hinted at practice, but Brother Caleb seemed not to expect... well, no, honestly, Brother Caleb mostly seemed too miserably distracted to serve as a good guidepost for anything right now. And Brother Fjord had been Sister Beau’s recommendation to begin with. Given their glee in playing off each other, she’d probably known he’d make an entertaining co-conspirator. Or at least, a better mimic than poor Brother Caleb was.

Yasha traded another speaking-glance with him: _you’ve got them sorted too?_

“Yes, but the problem is proving it,” he replied, watching the Beaus out of the corner of his eye; he was fairly sure they couldn’t tell his focus-point without human pupils to track. “Should we be cruel or kind?”

“You be kind. I’ll be cruel.”

“Oh my Goddess,” Brother Fjordbeau said, grinning with both hands clasped to his heart, and Sister Actualbeau cuffed him across the head.

“All right, the kinder challenge: Acrobatics. Let’s see which of you is expecting to balance around your hips, and which of you is expecting to balance around your shoulders.”

“That’s cheating!” Brother Fjordbeau protested. “You just heard me say that!”

“Would you prefer to taste Yasha’s cruelty, then?”

“Pfft. Bring it,” Brother Fjordbeau said, and Molly realized the poor man’s fundamental mistake: Brother Fjord thought that Sister Beau was much, _much_ more confident with actual women than she really was. Or at least, with actual Yashas. Still. This was going to hurt.

Yasha stepped onto the stage with her deadliest slink in full, devastating effect.

Brother Calebbeau actually turned a shade paler, the poor thing. He hadn’t asked to be caught in the middle of the lesbian disaster that was Brother Fjord trying to keep up with his clearly over-generous estimate of Sister Beau’s flirting skills.

(Fortunately, there was more brandy, or would be until Nott finished her whiskey and moved on; Molly would have to offer a medicinal libation once the tragedy was past, if the poor monk didn’t die of mortification in the meantime.)

“Um,” Sister Actualbeau said. “I’m surprisingly okay with the acrobatics thing, actually. Can we go back to that one?”

“Oh, shit,” Nott said, with the startled glee of the newly enlightened, munching on a fistful of the candied chestnuts Mama Ruby kept specially for her.

“Um,” Jester agreed, having come to much the same conclusion. “Should we stop them here?”

“Nah,” Nott said, looking at Brother Calebbeau. “I think the phrase they used was ‘fucking hilarious,’ yeah? Good for the goose, good for the ...other geese.”

“Remind me never to upset you,” Molly said, having concluded that Nott was the most dangerous person in the room about three seconds after she gleefully handed him over to his mother on a leash.

Yasha stalked over to Brother Fjordbeau first, and took his hand between her own; holding his gaze steadily, she lifted his hand to her lips and kissed the back of it.

Brother Fjordbeau was still a Cassiline; he looked a little pink around the ears. But he wanted so much to warmly represent his friend’s ordinarily-gregarious personality well that he hadn’t even noticed how much the original had frozen stiff.

“I was promised some cruelty here, my goddess.”

“Oh, not bad,” Jester said, considering. “Mind if I use that one?”

“Be my guest. Credit where it’s due, of course.”

“You’re not the one who’ll suffer for it,” Yasha pointed out.

Brother Fjordbeau really was talented; he had Beau’s challenging little chin-lift down cold. “Try me.”

Yasha caught him by the chin, bent her head, and kissed him thoroughly. When she let him go, Brother Calebbeau had to surreptitiously keep him from falling on his ass; still, he managed Beau’s favorite rakehell grin.

“Still not seeing the cruelty, my goddess. Maybe you’d better lay me on your altar, for a better view of heaven.”

“Ew, too much,” Nott said, nose scrunched; she took a swig of her whiskey. “Better the first time. Also you forgot to give a fuck. A couple fucks really.”

Sister Actualbeau and Brother Fjordbeau flipped Nott off in unison, without a moment’s hesitation from either one. Brother Calebbeau choked on incredulity, and wheezed a bit over his clear shock that there could be _two_ Cassilines with Sister Beau’s impiety if Brother Fjord ever loosened his self-control a bit.

When Yasha looked at Brother Calebbeau, he made a small squeaking sound.

“B-begging my angel’s mercy…?”

She reached out and tweaked his nose, then moved on, to his evident relief.

Molly hadn’t realized Sister Actualbeau could blush that brightly even before Yasha took her hand. The moment Yasha began to lift her hand toward her lips, the frozen-over attempt at cool splintered.

“You, uh, you obviously caught us. Ha ha ha. That was totally the real Beau, game over, time to swap now.”

“I obviously caught you,” Yasha agreed. “That was totally the Beau you wanted to be real.”

Bending close enough that Beau’s cheek was only a slight head-tilt from her lips, Yasha added, “He was invested in making his friend proud. What are you invested in, Sister Beau?”

For all her awkwardness around devastatingly hot angel-born women, Sister Beau had never lacked for courage at the tipping-point. She took a careful breath, closed her eyes, and lifted her head to softly brush her lips against Yasha’s.

Yasha curved a hand around Sister Beau’s waist to keep her steady, and leaned into exploring further. Jester made a tiny squeak of delight, then put her hands over her mouth, to not disturb them.

When they parted, Yasha brushed a thumb over her cheek, smiling down into her eyes. “Any fancy words?”

Sister Beau opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, then managed an entirely reverent, _“Holy fuck.”_

Then, two heartbeats later, she scrubbed a hand over her face: “Shit, I did _not_ just say that out loud.”

With laughter crinkling at the corner of her eyes, Yasha said, “I do prefer honesty.”

“Right! Good. Um. Good to know. Totally taking a note. Mentally. No paper. -- _Fuck._ ” A little wild-eyed, she said desperately, “Caleb’s turn! _NOW.”_

Brother Calebbeau ran both hands down his face. “I don’t want to see this.”

“I do!” Nott and Beau declared in unison.

Mama Ruby looked up from the tracing-work and smiled at them; a flick of her fingertips and a soft murmur made three of Caleb, and Sister Beaucaleb dashed for the curtains with a not-entirely-un-Caleb need to hide. The other two exchanged a look of rueful commiseration.

“Sorry, man,” Brother Fjordcaleb said, clapping a hand on Brother Actualcaleb’s shoulder as they ducked behind the curtains to make the shell-swaps.

What started out as an under-the-breath argument quickly escalated into some thumping and shoving that made the curtains bulge oddly; then one of them came staggering out of the curtain backwards, arms flailing out of balance. He dropped an armful of books on the floor, then scrabbled to pick them up.

Sharing an immediate glance and nod, Nott, Yasha, and Molly declared in unison, “Fail!”

“What? I didn’t even say anything!” Sister Beaucaleb protested.

“He’d break his own arm before he dropped a book face-first and page-crunchy,” Nott said smugly, arms crossed.

“And I dare you to _actually_ mimic his method of speech,” Molly added; he’d have reinforced Nott with another arm-cross if his mother weren’t still tracing the serpent that twined around his forearm.

“I’ll have you know I am a profoundly overeducated, and yet strangely self-denigrating, intellectual snob who can sling highfalutin bullshit with the best of them--”

“Fail!” they chorused again.

“Excuse me! I didn’t even say fuck once!”

“Faaaaaaail!”

Flipping a double-bird at the entire audience, Sister Beaucaleb stalked out of the cleared space and flopped onto the floor-pillows again.

The moment she stepped off the ‘stage,’ another of the Brother Calebs stepped through the curtain and started picking up the books, careful to smooth out the pages before closing a cover. He handed the first two books he reclaimed to the Brother Caleb behind him, then kept the next pair, and then stood beside his duplicate with an almost protective hunch to his shoulders and a  stubborn tilt to the chin.

Molly opened his mouth to say _nicely done, Brother Fjord,_ but then bit his lip. There was nothing he could have directly pointed to, nothing but instinct: Brother Probablyfjord’s body language seemed a breath too precisely poised. And the actual Brother Caleb wouldn’t have moved first; he would  have hesitated to do anything at all to draw attention to himself under such scrutiny.

Still, that was a new item Molly added to his mental deck of cards: Somewhere, Brother Fjord had learned to mimic a _wide_ variety of other people awfully well. Sister Beau was one thing; she was clearly a close friend with an accent that nearly matched the city they lived in. But if he could match Brother Caleb as well? That far-northeastern Camaeline accent was as far from Brother Fjord’s southwestern Siovalese as it was possible to go without actually leaving the country.

“Come on, guys, say something,” Sister Beaucaleb said. “Small talk. Hop to it.”

They traded a glance. “Us? Small talk?” one said.

“Voluntarily?” the other said.

“Ha ha. Read the books or something.”

Brother Probablycaleb took to that suggestion like a lifeline -- one that in hindsight he was perhaps a little too trusting of. He opened the book to the middle, looked down, and blushed scarlet to the roots of his hair.

“Is that even _possible?”_

Nott choked on her whiskey and spent a while caught between coughing and laughing.

“Is what possible?” The other Brother Caleb looked over, then tilted his head. Then his eyes went startlingly wide. He clamped a hand over the top half of his face, trying and failing to block out the image he’d just burned into his brain, and doing an entirely creditable job of blushing to match his twin.

“Mama,” Jester said, entirely failing at a kindly-meant effort to keep her face straight. “Is that what I think it is?”

“The illuminated edition,” Mama Ruby agreed, with a serenity that was very cat-smug at the edges. “Sometimes it helps to have diagrams.”

The Brothers Caleb traded a frantic look with each other: “Different book?” “Different book!”

The first one set the illuminated edition aside carefully, and then they conferred over the spines of the remaining three as though deliberating how to remove a fragile treasure from a loaded mousetrap. From the dimples in Mama Ruby’s grin, Molly suspected they were in for a challenge.

“Try the _Trois Milles Joies_ ; it’s less illuminated. Also less, er, illuminating,” Jester advised, torn between mercy and amusement.

Brother Probablycaleb, holding the _Trois Milles Joies_ , looked at Brother Probablyfjord for assistance. Brother Probablyfjord ran a hand through his now-ginger hair and said tentatively, “Flip for something without pictures, and hope for the best? Or start at the front under the idea it’s, er, more beginner at the beginning?”

“You’re not even Siovalese!” Molly yelped, utterly astonished by the realization.

“Good catch,” Yasha said proudly. Of _course_ she’d already figured it out. Still, one of these days Molly was going to surprise her. In the meantime, he’d have to settle for having surprised everyone else.

“Yes, we already established I’m Camaeline,” Brother Fjordcaleb said, in a valiant attempt at cover.

“Right, right, I’m sorry. Go on.”

Nose crinkled, Brother Actualcaleb said, “But going on means we have to _read that._ ”

Sister Beaucaleb said, “All right, I’m calling bullshit. _I_ can’t tell which one’s which and I’ve known them for years.”

“Oh, don’t worry, they’re more than good enough for anything they’d encounter in the roles we’re planning,” Yasha said. “Molly, your turn for the hat trick.”

He made a sour face. “Instinct? I can barely explain it myself. Any time you have two Brother Calebs and you put them on a stage being examined by an entire audience? The real Brother Caleb -- I suspect he’d rather eat rocks than be put on display like this every day, yes?”

“Yes,” Brother Actualcaleb said sourly.

“Brother Fjord is a fantastic mimic; you don’t pick that up unless you’ve practiced with some sort of audience. He wants people to believe his interactions, so he does interact. Brother Caleb didn’t want an audience at all. So the real Brother Caleb was going to be the one who tried to guard everything. Fewer words and gestures. More still, more quiet, more wary.”

“All right, that’s fair. You’re totally cheating though,” Sister Beau said. “Nobody’s going to be comparing them side by side if we run the con right.”

“Totally and completely cheating! Cheating _works,”_ Molly said, entirely shameless about it. “So I knew which one was Brother Fjord, but he’s not... I don’t know. He’s not overdoing the Camaeline accent; he’s damn near perfect. It’s what’s underneath the fact that he _can_ be that good. He’s starting from a different reaching-point than he should have, if he were actually Siovalese? He’s starting from a different neutral. Does that make any sense at all?“

“He reaches for Siovalese as much as he does for Camaeline,” Yasha said.

“Yes! Exactly. And you’re frighteningly good at it,” Molly added for Fjord’s benefit, admiring. “I can hear it, but I couldn’t begin to pull it off the way you do. Take it from a professional charlatan: you’re _brilliant._ ”

“Thanks,” Brother Fjordcaleb said; he didn’t look particularly happy, though. “Um. Beau, how pissed are you?”

“I don’t know; you tell me,” she said, arms crossed behind her head. “Are you the kind of not-Siovalese who like moved there too late for that to be your own accent but you always thought it was cool? Or are you the kind of not-Siovalese who never lived there at all, and every single story you’ve told me for the past ten years was a lie?”

Molly winced, suddenly reconsidering what he’d thought to be a harmless guessing-game of magpie-clever snatching at glittering details that caught the eye.

Fjord winced too. “A little bit of both?” he offered, with an awkward shrug; the Siovalese drawl was creeping back in, likely from habit. “I always wanted to be from Siovale. It seemed like it would be better than… where I started out. I made it there eventually. I loved the place. Some of the stories are completely true! Some of them are… better than what was true. Sometimes what was true was ...kind of bad. I wanted to be done with all that. I wanted to leave it behind. And we were all kids. Nobody else knew the actual truth, so if I just told the good parts version, it didn’t trouble anybody.”

Studying his Caleb-face carefully, Sister Beau said, “We’re going to talk later.”

“That’s fair.”

“The stampeding bull race?”

“That one was totally true!” Fjord protested, with the kind of sincerity they’d just heard him flawlessly mimic.

Beau glanced at Yasha and Molly, having apparently adopted them as her personal Fjord-readers somewhere along the way.

“I’ve got a rough where, but no whats or whens. If I could palm-read him, maybe?” Molly said. “Or Yasha could set up a two-point read.”  

“You’re going to have to teach me _so much_ of this! Cards and palms and swords and, and everything,” Jester said, caught between enthusiasm and a touch of nerves. “I mean, I guess part of the point is for me not to be _too_ much like you, but I should at least be kind of plausible?” Then she blinked, and looked at Fjord again.

“You’re Cassiline. You know about sharp blades and things, right? If we put some horns on you, could you be our not-Molly?”

Scratching behind his ear again -- that was a tell Molly might warn him about later, if he wouldn’t need to use it to spot him -- Fjord said, “I don’t know? I mean, I know Beau and Caleb a lot better.”

“But you don’t have to do actual-Molly, just somebody who kind of acts like him onstage.”

“Darling, I am inimitable,” Molly said, on pure reflex. “Though you’re certainly welcome to play along.”

“Perhaps tomorrow?” Mama Ruby said. “I only have a bit of glamourie left in me, and Molly needs that for this evening. Besides, it’s going to take me some practice to be able to reproduce this _and_ something not-quite-this.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, I wasn’t thinking,” Jester said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, dear, just a bit worn out by all your young energy!” Mama Ruby assured her. “I’m grateful, really; this will be the first _night’s_ rest I’ve had for some time. Molly, love, did you ever decide what color you’d like to be?”

“I can’t look like you?” Molly said before he thought, and then bit his lip when she gave him the saddest smile he’d ever seen.

“Not just now, sweetheart. The new initiate without a single inch of marque who’s so eager to learn can’t look like any of us.”

“If green is safer, you should be green,” Yasha informed him, arms crossed. She was still upset that she couldn’t guard him publicly until the rest of the _kumpanya_ had been set free.

Molly wrinkled his nose at the thought, then shot an apologetic look at Fjord and Nott. “There’s nothing wrong with green!” he said hastily. “It’s just that everything I own coordinates with lavender.”

“‘Coordinates’ is a stretch,” Sister Beau said, grinning, and Molly nudged his teasing-plans back up a notch.

“But that means it’s _better_ if you’re green, anyway,” Jester pointed out. “The blade-dancer’s costume couldn’t possibly belong to green-you.” Noting his crestfallen reaction, she added quickly, “And it means we get to go shopping _twice!”_

“Tempting,” Molly admitted. “But I really love that coat.”

“I’ll take good care of it,” Mama Ruby soothed, stroking gentle fingertips through his curls. “Leave it here with me so that nothing gets spilled on it in a big bustling night-market.”

“And so nobody recognizes it, I know.” He sighed extra dramatically, because he suspected his mother would still indulge him more than she ought, from the newness of having each other back. “What about yellow? At least I could still wear the primaries. Or even yellow-green? Not blue-green, please. Trying to match shades of aqua to anything else is the stuff of nightmares.”

“Picky much? I’d think you’d have wanted teal, you’re such a peacock already,” Sister Beau said. (Yes, definitely escalating the teasing roster.)

“There are entire schools of study around artisanal color theory!”

“And you haven’t got a clue about any of them.”

“Yes, but they _exist._ ”

“You’re _two_ , and you spent your whole life learning your sense of tasteful restraint from _a literal circus._ ”

“If we’re going to get personal, dear, you’ve spent most of your life learning how to choose your wardrobe from -- hmm, let’s see, what was it again? -- an entire vast array of _identical monastic robes_.”

“Fuck you too, Molly.”

“Play nice, children,” Jester said.

“Oh, you did not even just say that,” Sister Beau said.

“Anyway! Find me a shade you like, darling?” Mama Ruby asked. “Think of it like trying on a new costume.”

Molly rolled over in the pile of pillows, looking around at the sumptuous fabrics and riotous plants and the rich warm cherrywood furniture. Then he looked down at his hands and arms again, considering.

The gold of the sun on his shoulder would certainly be different; no one would mistake him for d’Angeline, but it was enough closer to a human skin tone that he might well find a new world of fabric-opportunities. The fire-gold phoenix and lion shimmering on a silken throw pillow caught his eye too.

“Gold like that?” he asked, brushing fingertips over the intricate embroidery. “I’m going to miss my art, though. I don’t like being boring.”

The looks of incredulous disbelief they all gave him were somewhere between comforting and irritating; he wasn’t entirely sure which.

“Trust me on this one, Molly,” Brother Fjord said. “Boring is the last word _anybody_ would use for you.”

“You might be a quieter canvas for a little while, but you’re still going to be a work of art,” Jester agreed. “...Oh, no. I know those eyes. What did I just say?”

“Blank canvas,” Molly echoed, utterly gleeful. “I could get _so much new art!_ ”

“Bad idea! Not permanent! They wouldn’t be able to tell what’s already really there!”

“I could get so much new henna?”

“Henna works.”


	9. I: The Magician: Giladé nó Jasmine de Mereliot, Second of Jasmine House, called Gil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Magician: An enchanting adept at the apex of his power. Skill, diplomacy, self-confidence, charm, and the occasional disaster. Life has no dress rehearsal; every night is the Magician’s greatest performance.
> 
> (In which we meet Gilmore, here the d’Angeline adept Giladé. Gil and Molly find they have a lot in common, which means the poor brothers Cassiline are grievously outmanned and out-finger-gunned: “My glorious master of the thousand arts of opulence, how hurt should we be that our favorite choir-boys don’t trust us with massage oil in one hand and their vows in the other?” “It depends on how euphemistically we should take their, ahem, ‘vows’ in hand, O radiant topaz of my night’s enchantment.”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Kushiel canon, the main character's most notable feature is her extraordinary relationship with pain. When I started writing, I decided no, we're not doing that to Molly. He has an extraordinary relationship with sensual pleasures instead. 
> 
> Also in Kushiel canon, Jasmine House only accepts people of color for their adepts. (I figure tieflings are colorful enough to suit!) The Critical Role character behind the Jasmine House second is a handsome black-haired bronze-skinned magician with a vibrant personality and apparently an enthusiastically nonjudgemental sex drive -- Shaun Gilmore, who even considers the chance of being turned into a dragon sexy. However, there was no way to make that extremely Celtic name fit the d’Angeline adepts’ pattern (Trent is meant to be an outlier in all the ways, including his name pattern). So like Jester’s d’Angeline name is Jessica, I started with Gil and worked back from that Giladé is a French variant on an Arabic name, which seemed likely for a location meant to be a cultural crossroads with both Middle Eastern and Greek influences in a French-analogue country. His House Mereliot is the ruling family of Eisande, because of course it is. That the Eisandine are welcoming to the Tsingani was a nice bonus.

_(Brother Caleb)_

In theory, Brother Caleb understood the pieces of the shell-game the Ruby of the Sea planned to play with the city’s rumors, the comparative rarity and distinctiveness of the children of the Fallen Companion, and Mandrake House.

Molly had to be four different people for it to work. The Tsingani blade-dancer had to _not_ be Lucien nó Mandrake; they needed to send a slightly but distinctly different purple tiefling away with the _kumpanya_ , in order for there to be space for Lucien to be someone else. Lucien nó Mandrake had to _not_ be Molly, because someone who _could_ be Lucien had to face Trent Ikithon for the contract signing. And Molly sometimes had to be someone who was none of them; someone entirely different was needed to be the new, young, unmarked adept eager to (re-)learn all of the things that Molly’s tattoos declared that he already knew.

And the Ruby of the Sea had sent a formal contract and a great deal of gold to the Cassiline Order for three particular monks to protect her family in these uncertain times. Protection meant proximity. Cassiline protection meant the best in all the realm. The young new initiate who was not Molly or Lucien needed to be seen about the Night Court and the marketplace, chaperoned by his dowayne, Jessica nó Orchis, and her Cassiline protectors. So all of them were to prepare themselves for an evening of being seen about the town and indulging the young initiate’s curiosity.  

Intellectually, it all nearly made sense.

In actual implementation, somehow, he was standing in a luxuriant whorehouse’s mirror-bedazzled, steam-and-incense-hazy bathhouse with two adepts encouraging him to get naked and join them. And Brother Caleb was despairingly certain that no amount of illusion-magic would ever hide how much Molly was, well, _Molly._

The person he’d dutifully followed into the Jasmine House bath was a decade younger, the warm sun-drenched gold of a lion’s pelt, without a single ink-mark on all that tawny skin. But Brother Caleb could see every blessed inch of his aforementioned tawny skin. Because the moment Brother Fjord had closed the men’s bath-house door behind them, Molly had stripped off every stitch of clothing in order to leap into the steaming pool.

The laughing sun-bronzed Eisandine adept with a fully made marque who’d led them to the bathhouse had swept a bow with a flourish and offered his service to all of the gentlemen, with an extra emphasis on the ‘all,’ and of course Molly had been delighted to oblige him.

They were already word-dancing over little bursts of over-the-top flattery and charm. Brother Caleb was honestly not certain whether he could survive an entire night with _two of them._  

“How is this our life?” Brother Fjord asked, flushed a little greener than usual from embarrassment as much as from the fragrant steam. “I mean. We took vows and things. We’ve been good, mostly. I think we’ve been good. What are we doing in a Jasmine bath-house with two extremely unclothed adepts?”

“Molly happened,” Brother Caleb said, trying to figure out where to look that wasn’t covered with mirrors showing him more than a Cassiline ought ever to know about the person he was charged to protect. (There weren’t a lot of options.) “I mean, Sister Beau happened to you, but Sister Beau happened to you because she brought the tea to me, and, really, Molly happened first.”

Honestly, it was more distracting to catch half-reflections and tantalizing hints. Brother Caleb took a steadying breath, or as much as he could of one in air so redolent with steam and incense and a surfeit of night-blooming jasmine blossoms, and forced himself to gaze steadily at the laughing pair entwined in the pool.

This was nothing that Cassiel had not endured in his own time, with Naamah’s beauty and Elua’s divine joy and all the hundreds of lovers they shared. Cassiel was the guardian. Cassiel was the one who watched, and did not partake, and unfailingly protected those who were distracted by their mortal loves.

Brother Caleb just… hadn’t quite realized a person could be so distractingly captivating in two entirely different skins. He’d somewhat naively thought the enchantment would help, that he would somehow be able to separate the brilliant, breathtaking, vivid adept from the theoretically innocent, unmarked, not-entirely-real initiate.

But he couldn’t see the initiate’s enchanted golden skin as anything but a circus-costume over someone who was still entirely Molly -- extraordinary body-paint, perhaps, not to wash off in the bath, but unquestionably Molly underneath it.

The initiate only existed at all because Molly _was_ inexperienced in the arts of Naamah’s Servants, and he needed to relearn from the beginning what the man who’d gained his marque once knew. All of this was breathtakingly new to him -- the luxury, the indulgence, the vast heated pool, the scented oils, the skillful adept whose hands touched and teased and enticed.

And his eager delight in the exploration of sensual new pleasures was ...distracting.

When the handsome Eisandine adept began to rub scented oils into Molly’s shoulders and chest, Molly made a breathy sound of astonishment that hooked itself under Caleb’s ribs and pulled sharply. He had to brace himself against the beauty of them entwined together, fire-gold and sun-bronze, as Molly laughed and poured a dollop of oil into his palm to return the man’s caresses.

“Do you think Sister Beau’s got to watch over an adept in the gals’ bath too?”

“I really don’t intend to think about that right now,” Brother Caleb said, trying not to let his gaze wander.

“Oh, do think about it,” Molly called to them, with a broad grin that showed a lot of pointed teeth. “That’s a priceless mental image.”

“Come and join us,” the adept added. “Never let it be said that the hospitality of Jasmine House was inadequate. I’ll be scolded if you find your welcome lacking.”

“They might have bought that if we hadn’t just met Ruby, Gil,” Molly advised the adept under his breath.

“Well, you’re in training, lovely one. You try,” Gil replied, and Molly’s eyes lit up.

“Oh no,” Brother Fjord said, taking a half-step backwards in sheer defensive reflex.

“Oh yes,” Gil said, with the sort of grin that reminded a person that cats were in fact predatory hunters as well as indolent pets.

Even waist-deep in the water, Molly somehow managed an astonishing conveyance of hip-swaying as he positively _slunk_ across the pool and draped himself along the pool-edge at their feet.

“Your robes will get steam-soggy if you just stand here like that,” Molly said, fingering the hem of Brother Fjord’s robe and turning a devastatingly sultry gaze up at them both. “Much better to take them off and fold them outside. You need to look respectable and protective this evening, yes? Why, it’s practically a sacred duty for you to come and freshen up with us. Think of the noble Cassiline reputation, if you show up all steam-rumpled and flush-cheeked and delectable...”

“We _are_ thinking of the noble Cassiline reputation,” Brother Caleb said, because Brother Fjord looked to have been struck dumb. Unfortunately, Molly then identified Brother Caleb as the tougher nut to crack, and sharply refocused his efforts.

He stretched further out of the pool with a dancer’s exquisite awareness of every inch of his body, leaning on both hands to show off the curve of his back and the not-at-all-idle sway of his tail as he bit his lip and looked soulfully up into Caleb’s face.

“Be kind,” he said, and trailed a damp fingertip over the leather of Caleb’s boot-buckle. “It’s only my first day of training, and I’m supposed to be learning how to be irresistible. Be gentle to a new student. At least let me lure you into the bath; I promise to honor your vows! But if you don’t let me seduce you at least a _little_ bit, I’m not going to learn from this, am I?”

“You don’t need training to be irresistible,” Brother Caleb murmured. “You’re a natural.”

“Why, thank you kindly, Brother Caleb. But then, if that were true, why are you not already in this magnificent bath with me?” His fingers walked delicately up the leather of Caleb’s boot, a fingertip at a time; but he stopped just at the very edge of the cuff, waiting for an invitation to touch further.

Brother Caleb thought of his vows, and closed his eyes in a brief, despairing moment’s prayer, and said, “It’s not your honor that I don’t trust.”

“Oh, he’s a stubborn one,” Gil said, draping himself along Molly’s side. “Here, little initiate-brother, here’s a more advanced technique for getting a gentleman’s clothes off of him.” And he reached back, swung his arm in a broad shallow sweep across the top of the pool, and splashed a wave of bath-water across both of them from their thighs down.

“You little _brat,_ ” Brother Fjord said, in an oddly wondering resignation.

“That. Um. That’s certainly a place to go. I would not have gone there myself, but it’s a place,” Molly said, looking back and forth between the monks almost anxiously. Almost as though he were fearful of their response.

But then, Caleb _had_ arrested his entire family and upended his life not even a full day earlier. He couldn’t let himself forget that; it was too easy to forget, in the face of Molly’s engaging charm.

“And that, my dear novice, is why you’re the initiate and I’m the adept,” Gil said loftily.

“No, that’s just why you’re a complete brat,” Brother Fjord replied, pouring water out of his boots and peeling off his soaked socks. “Come on, Caleb, we’d both better strip while anything’s still dry.”

“Fjord--”

“I’m willin’ to bet the next thing on the complete-brat tactics list looks like ‘grab ‘em by the ankles and drag ‘em in with their clothes and boots still on,’” Fjord said sourly. Feigned or not, his Siovalese accent grew thicker in the grip of irritation. “Dunno about you, but I’m not plannin’ to find out the hard way.”

Despair felt oddly close to scalding as it washed over him. Brother Caleb told himself firmly, _I needed a way to discourage the pair of them from pursuing me any further. This will certainly put them off._

He pulled his boots off first, tipped out the water, and set them aside, then began unbuttoning the long tight sleeves that covered his scars. It was more of a struggle than usual; his hands were shaking.

He heard Molly take a small sharp breath, and couldn’t help turning away to hide his half-bared arm. A moment later, though, there was a gentle, feverishly-warm touch against his ankle.

“Hey,” Molly said. “Need a hand?”

Brother Caleb couldn’t find words that wouldn’t be cruel, about what it felt like to hear that offer from someone who had known he was beautiful his entire life. He turned his shoulder a little further away, and began fumbling through his off-hand’s effort at the buttons.

The water splashed behind him, and then there were dripping sounds, and two very wet hands touched his shoulders.

“Let me help?” Molly asked softly; his breath was startlingly warm against Caleb’s ear, and Caleb could feel the radiant heat of him all along his back. “Any and all vested interest in getting you naked aside, I do have both hands free.”

“I’d thought this would be enough of a warning,” Brother Caleb muttered, clutching one hand over the worst of the scarring despite himself.

Molly chuckled, low and warm and unbearably inviting. “My dear immovable object, let me introduce you to an irresistible force-in-training.”

 _“Don’t mock me,”_ Brother Caleb snapped, raw and injured. “There’s no way you could find this pleasant. I know what I am. I don’t know whether to bless or curse those who raised you, for never teaching you any shame.”

Molly pressed forward, a hot wet line of living skin against his back, and leaned his cheek over Caleb’s shoulder, and began gently unfastening more buttons.

“Well, they taught me what the word means,” he said easily. “Fortunately, I have no need of it.”

Brother Caleb laughed despite himself. “You’re right,” he said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re young and fearless and charming, exploring a new world that was made for someone like you, someone free to delight in sensuality. But I am none of those things, and I have a hundred reasons for shame, including what I’ve done to you.”  

“Now, that’s not true at all.”  Molly took him by the shoulders and turned him until they could face each other. Brother Caleb fixed his gaze on the pulse-point at the hollow of his throat, because he couldn’t meet his eyes, but he couldn’t look any lower.

“You blame yourself for my rediscovering a family I never knew?” Molly asked.

“That’s the only thing I don’t blame myself for.”

“Brother Caleb, you don’t just have issues; you have entire volumes. Let’s see what we can do about that. You blame yourself for the sky being blue? I forgive you.”

“...What?”

“If you can blame yourself for silly things beyond your control, I can forgive you for silly things beyond your control, and the conclusion will at least make no _less_ sense than the premise. So! I forgive you for those robes being such a horrendously dull sparrow-gray.”

He lifted Caleb’s hand, and brushed a kiss against the unbuttoned cuff of his inner kirtle. Caleb stared down at the top of his head, utterly bemused.

“Oh, and I also forgive you for those unfairly hot boots. Take it from a connoisseur: Boots like that make suggestions, darling. And yet I think your holy order might frown on the suggestions they make.”

Molly shivered a little, and Caleb would have taken it for an affected comment about the boots’ hotness if he hadn’t noticed the gooseflesh on the back of Molly’s hand. And he was demonborn; their lives burned hotter than the d’Angelines to begin with, and yet he was standing there soaking wet and naked, and now shivering.

“Get back in the water,” Brother Caleb said, startled. “You shouldn’t take a chill like this.”

“Only when you come with me!” Molly replied, with the gleeful grin of a gambler who’d realized that he’d just drawn a winning card if he played it well.

Swearing under his breath in Skaldian, Brother Caleb unfastened his belt and laid aside his daggers, folded the tabards roughly in quarters, and shrugged out of the gray surplice. The pants barely took a wriggle and kick once the belt had been removed, but he utterly froze when he touched the white collar.   

“What am I doing?” he whispered.

“I’m no expert, mind,” Molly said, tugging the collar free and beginning to unbutton the chest of Caleb’s black kirtle, without a moment’s hesitation at the scarring he revealed. “First day of training, you know. But to my novice’s eye, it looks like you’re taking a bath.”

“You’re a brat too,” Brother Fjord said, sunk up to his chin in the water. “You’ll fit right in around this crew.”

He’d stripped down much more efficiently than Caleb had, with nothing to be ashamed of in his body; however, he was conducting a sharply wary glare-match with Gil, who grinned at him with a bottle of oil in one hand and expressively twitching fingers.

“What, do the lot of you ordinarily bathe in icy mountain waterfalls for some sort of symbolic gestures of purity and endurance?” Molly asked. “I could see picking up an aversion to bathing under circumstances like that.”

“Nah, nothing like that,” Brother Fjord said. “But we also don’t do these vast hypocaust-heated incense-burning temples to simmering hedonism, either.”

“Well, then, clearly _all_ our education is lacking! Master Gil, you have a great deal of enlightenment to bestow upon your poor naive students,” Molly said brightly.

He folded the black kirtle and set it on top of the surplice with a pat, then took Caleb’s hands and tugged just enough to coax.  

“Honestly, my dear, you don’t want to give me a complex on my very first day. What kind of self-respecting adept will I become if I can’t even lure a weary man into a warm bath?”

“It’s not you, kid, it’s us,” Brother Fjord said, and shifted a little so his own back was closer to the stone edge of the pool. “And to be fair, at this point it’s mostly him.”

“Oh,” Molly said, startled, and touched careful fingertips to Caleb’s scarred chest. “Does it hurt still? I’m sorry, I wasn’t even thinking of that possibility.”

“It’s not that,” Brother Caleb protested, torn between a tangled-up disbelief that Molly could touch him without flinching, a guilty relief that Molly could touch him without flinching, and despair over the realization that he would have nothing but his own faltering strength to place between his vows of coldly vigilant duty and Molly’s growing exploration of Blessed Elua’s one loving commandment to all save the Angel Cassiel himself. “I’m sorry. I’m not -- it’s not -- here.”

He took a deep breath and waded into the water all at once, so that he could crouch down like Fjord for at least a semblance of modesty. Molly joined him with a gleeful splash, and sighed in bliss at the heat of the bath.

“There, now, isn’t this much better?”

Brother Caleb nodded awkwardly, because even he wasn’t enough of a hypocrite to try to deny it.

“Very good, class, even if one of us is a bit tardy,” Gil said, clapping his hands together. “I assume we’ve chosen our partners for our first lesson, then?”

“Howdy, partner,” Brother Fjord said immediately, reaching out to grab Brother Caleb’s arm in a grip of panicked steel. “Yep. Partner chosen. Bow to the corner, allemande left?”

“And you’re a calling-dancer as well? Hidden depths, Brother Fjord,” Molly said, with a speculative glitter in those startling red eyes. “Giladé, my glorious master of the thousand arts of opulence, how hurt should we be that our favorite choir-boys don’t trust us with massage oil in one hand and their vows in the other?”

“It depends on how euphemistically we should take their, ahem, ‘vows’ in hand, O radiant topaz of my night’s enchantment.”

“No. Just no,” Brother Caleb said, sinking a little deeper into the water.

“Besides, your topaz there should learn from the best, right?” Brother Fjord added.

“True enough,” Gil said, stroking appreciative fingertips down the curve of Molly’s cheek. “A gemstone needs a master’s hand in the setting.”

“Right. Yeah. You teach him all the things. We’ll, er, we’ll just be over here, learning by watching, or something. Mostly we’ll be over here.”

“Your loss, boys,” Gil said easily, and brushed a kiss against the curve of Molly’s horn. “Wait here for a moment, my gem.”

He climbed out of the water far less innocently than Molly had, with a knowing bounce in his step; Brother Caleb looked down at the water, because Gil knew exactly where all the mirrors were. He knelt beside a little alcove and brought out a set of baskets that he set in the water, then nudged them to float in Molly’s direction, before he stepped back in as well.

“I understand you’re to be initiated in Orchis House,” Gil told Molly. “But part of your training will be to taste the other Houses as well, to find the path that speaks to your heart. I came from Orchis myself; I believe there should always be joy in this, whatever more specific path it may later take. For me, Jasmine’s sensuality is a particularly lovely framework for the arts of pleasure. So: Let’s begin with exploring the elements together.”

He lifted a pair of candles out of one of the baskets, lit them from an ember nestled in an intricately-carved stone vessel, and sprinkled a pinch of incense-powder atop the softening wax, then set them to float in the pool.

The candle-flames leapt into a thousand mirror-reflections, as though the adept had just hung all the stars in the sky for his client’s pleasure; Molly made a wordless sound of wonder, gazing around at the glittering radiance.

“You _are_ a treasure; I’m going to enjoy this,” Gil murmured, smiling. “Give some thought to Jasmine House once you’ve finished your initiate training, my jewel. Sensuality suits you well.”

From the other basket, he produced a double-handful of lush peony blossoms, white and palest blush-pink and deep rose, and he nestled tiny star-white jasmine petals among them before he set them adrift.

“Fire from the stars, tamed to my touch in candle-flames; air and incense, heaven’s breath. From the green earth, a night’s fragile flowering beauty adrift in the water that cradles and supports us. Here, now, you float effortlessly at the heart of all things; trust my hands to guide you deeper still.”

Brother Caleb had never seen Molly left speechless before. When Gil cupped a hand behind his head and laid him back into the water, he yielded willingly, his eyes luminous with the reflection of a thousand glittering fire-stars.

“Do you think you can float like this for me, or would you like a bit of support?”

“Mmmhmm.”

With a quiet chuckle, Gil said, “Pillow, then. When it’s your turn to guide, if one of your clients drifts away like this? Fetch the floating-pillow. Water up the nose is the least sexy experience ever.”

Still cradling Molly’s head carefully, Gil flicked one of the baskets closer with a fingertip before he reached in for a fascinatingly carved bit of open-worked cedar wood that he settled under the back of Molly’s neck. Then he trailed his fingertips along his cheek and throat, following his arm down to his hand, careful never to let the contact break.

“Still good?”

“Fantastic,” Molly said dreamily, still gazing up at the candle-stars as he twined his fingers through Gil’s. “My God, this has been a day.”

“And the night is still young,” Gil teased. “You’re in no fit state to study anything, are you?”

“Pffft.”

“Yes, quite. So first, we have the practical demonstration; I’ll assign the test later, when you’re least expecting it. There are three thousand named arts of loving touch in our canon, my jewel, but I’ll restrain myself to what I think you might remember tomorrow morning. Back to our four elements.”

Gil cupped one of the peonies in the hand that wasn’t keeping Molly oriented, let the water drip free of its petals for a moment, and then brushed the petals softly over his lips and throat.

“Earth is the root of all carnal beauty,” he said. “If we had more time, and if you weren’t more than half under already, I would paint you with flower-petals and honey, teach you a dozen pleasure-spices, and kiss the first light of dawn from the living pulse-point of your throat. But for now, when you seek the element of earth, remember the caress of flowers.”

Under the water, Brother Fjord clutched at Caleb’s hand hard. Caleb understood; he needed the grounding of a touch of discomfort himself. Neither of them had been prepared for playful, obnoxious Gil to begin teaching the fullness of a trained adept’s erotic arts with nothing more overtly sexual than a touch to the lips.

“Fire is the muse of inspiration,” Gil said, drawing one of the lit candles close again, and tipping some of the wax into an upturned shell. “Every art is forged in the flame of its maker’s passion, illuminated by the light, warmed by the heat. You and I could burn together, my golden jewel. Perhaps one day, if you would let me touch deeply enough to feel that spark of life at the core of you, perhaps we’ll dance to a different flame. For tonight, though, you’ve entrusted yourself to the hands of a fully trained and marqued adept, and I am not fool enough to touch a bliss-dreamer with true-fire. Let me paint you with the daughter of fire instead.”

He dipped the fingertips of his free hand into the slightly-cooled wax, then streaked his fingers down Molly’s chest. Molly made a shocked sound of visceral pleasure that hit Caleb like a fist.

Gil smiled like a master craftsman who knew exactly how skilled he was, and expected the appropriate respect from his beholders. He set the shell aside, and dipped fingertips into his next element with an artist’s elegant grace.

“Water is the mother of life, cradling you close, enduring through all. When you yield the burden of living entirely to the water, it lifts you and holds you and lets you float free. Within and without, touching every soft inch of your skin, coursing through your veins, welling up in tears -- a private, silent, drifting world to rest together and heal.”

He cupped a palmful of water and let it drip through his fingers to splash against the wax-marks; when his hand was nearly empty, he streaked the last few drops along Molly’s cheek.

“If I thought your virginal guardians could survive it, I might teach you a taste of water’s savagery as much as its tenderness. Alas, we lack the privacy to ride the stormfront, or plumb the ferocity of the ocean-depths. So, for today, remember that water yields at the softest touch, but endures beyond stone; remember that tears can be a sacrament of joy as well.”

Bending closer to blow lightly across the tear-trails he’d left on Molly’s cheeks, Gil stroked his hair and murmured, “Air is the mystery of the divine. A breath of foresight or fortune, a butterfly’s wing, a dreamer’s ethereal vision. You sense it most clearly in the presence of the others: a flickering candle, a chill breeze in the damp, a wisp of fragrance. But I think you have little need of my guidance to fly the path of the spirit-touched, my gem. Dream for me for just a moment.”

He folded both of Molly’s hands over his heart, and held them for a long, silent moment. Despite all the candle-flames, something shadow-haunted flickered across Gil’s face, like a half-caught glimpse of raven-wings. 

He ran a distracted hand through his hair, then re-centered himself visibly, and moved with quiet purpose toward the Cassilines.

“I don’t suppose you understand what you’re seeing, do you?” Gil murmured. He’d lost his playfully sensual provocation somewhere along the way; the intensity of his focus was unexpected.

“You’re very talented,” Brother Caleb said, a little hoarse.

“Well. True, but entirely beside the point. Do you know what the point is?”

“He’s had a hell of a long day and you lulled him to sleep?” Brother Fjord guessed.

“...No, you don’t know. All right. Brothers, let me make this exceedingly clear.” Gil leaned closer, dropped his voice, and said, “You are  _ never _ to let that man within a hundred yards of  _ either _ Mandrake  _ or _ Valerian adepts until he’s been fully re-trained.”


	10. The Magician, continued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The poet of the jewels was not Taryon no Eglantine. Gil offers Brother Caleb some retraining of his own, for everyone's sake. And like Sister Beau, Gil and Molly do have their priorities:
> 
> “Right here, hmm? Won’t your pretty clothes get wet?”  
> “Pfft. Who needs clothes?”  
> “An excellent point, darling! Your beauty shines without any need of further adornment. But remember, clothes make a marvelous excuse for shopping. And there’s jewelry too.”  
>  _“Jewelry,”_ Molly said, with the urgency of any two-year-old.  
>  “Yes, dear, but we have to get dressed first.”  
> “Why?”

A cold shock ran down Caleb’s spine: _"Re-_ trained?”

“How did you know to say that?” Brother Fjord asked warily.

“Oh, don’t worry, you were careful enough not to mention his name aloud,” Gil said, with a particularly brittle touch of politesse. “If you see Ruby before I do, tell her that her glamourie isn’t enough. I’ll see what I can do with paints before you take to the streets tonight.”

“Mister Gil,” Brother Fjord said, standing up to recenter his balance, in case he was about to need to do something excessively violent. “Mister Gil, please tell me something that makes this make sense. Because I really don’t want to have to knock your ass out cold and drag you off to wake Miss Ruby and find out whether she thinks you’re gonna cause her family some trouble.”

Gil managed a small, twisted, terrible smile that was mostly grief.

“She left his smile,” he murmured, his voice breaking. “That man is not Lucien, not anymore. But he used to be. I could never forget the way that he smiled.”

“Oh, hell,” Brother Fjord said. “You’re the poet of the jewels, aren’t you.”

“I am the Second of Jasmine House,” he said, and scrubbed tears from his cheek with an impatient hand. “I’ve been her Second since before Jessica followed her heart to Orchis.”

“And also the poet of the jewels?”

“...And also that, yes.” Struggling to smile more properly, he said, “Don’t tell the children? Jess is entirely certain it was Taryon nó Eglantine.”

With a small sigh, Brother Fjord waded a couple steps nearer and hugged the adept close. Gil curled into the support and let himself breathe in Fjord’s quiet strength, resting his cheek against the pulse-point of his heart.

“I... I don’t suppose... you know what happened to him...?”

“I’m sorry,” Brother Caleb said awkwardly. “None of us know, not even him.”

“Well. And we haven’t the time for me to… to indulge my grief like this. Not if Jess truly means to display him on the promenade tonight as her newest initiate.” Blinking at stubborn tears, Gil asked, “You’ve been so careful not to say it aloud... what is the initiate’s name?”

“Oh,” Brother Fjord said, realizing, and he traded a rueful look with Caleb. “We, uh, we didn’t name the initiate?  There’s got to be four of him, but we’ve only got two of him named.”

“Well, then, let him be my radiant Topaz for this evening, at least. And let me come with you tonight; I am well enough known in Night’s Doorstep to be indulged in my occasional whims.” Then his eyes startled wide: “Naamah’s glory, I have to find something to wear!”

Fjord made a half-strangled noise caught partway between a cough and a giggle. Gil was perfectly placed to dig an elbow into his ribs, and did.

“Oh, you have _no_ room to laugh; your choices are gray, gray, black, or gray. Did Jessica mention her theme? -- _No?_ What was she thinking? Fine, I’ll handle it. The Horned God would be entirely too on the nose for him, of course; if I still have my Akkadian silk somewhere, though…” Gil bit his lip, eyes flickering through rapid calculations.

“Should we wake him?” Brother Caleb asked, looking over at Molly, who still drifted smiling in some strange, sweet half-waking dream.

Gil looked at him sharply, then made some sort of mental allowance: “Cassilines,” he breathed, running a palm down his face. “No, just wait with him. Talk a bit; let him hear your voices. Touch his arm or hand once he’s acknowledged you. When he’s rejoined us, keep him warm in the pool; he might be unsteady on his feet for a few minutes. With any luck, I’ll be back quickly enough to handle any deeper aftercare.”

“Aftercare?” Brother Caleb asked, startled. “I thought that was for after -- discipline. Is he hurt?”

 _“No,”_ Gil said immediately. “No. Only the physical world is sometimes a disappointment, and we should ease the path back as we may. Although sometime, young brother, you should tell me why discipline that injures is the first aftercare-association that comes to a Cassiline’s thoughts.”

Brother Caleb grimaced, looking away. “Trent Ikithon.”

“Blessed Elua’s mercy. I’m sorry,” Gil murmured, and reached out to grasp Caleb’s hand. “Do you drink at all? This would, I believe, be a justifiably medicinal application of mind-easing. It’s likely that we need to clarify a great many things for you, and yet I don’t wish to cause you to expire from sheer force of blushing in the process.”

“Never mind,” Caleb said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You are that initiate’s sworn guardian, Brother Caleb. Your understanding of these things now matters a great deal more than it might have a week ago.”

Then he sighed a little, and pulled away from them both. “Some time _after_ I have drunk enough to cope with the prospect of this conversation and slept off the results, I am going to sit all three of you down and we will have an excruciatingly frank discussion about the care and tending of vision-touched initiates who yield everything so willingly to ecstatic trance. Right now, however, we’re on a clock.”

He cupped water from the pool to wash the tear-marks from his face, then lifted himself over the edge with far less coquetry than he’d displayed earlier; still, he’d only wrapped a towel around his dripping hair before striding to the door and calling out for an attendant. The half-marqued adept who stepped in and listened to his instructions seemed not the least bit surprised by where he was and was not wearing that towel.

It made a fraction more sense when Gil padded back across the floor and slipped back into the pool with them, but Brother Caleb said, “I thought you were busy?”

“Priorities,” Gil replied, with an unusually serious gaze. “If I had to, I could throw on a bedsheet and call myself the Emperor’s beloved Antoninus and make it work. But -- forgive me for this; I don’t mean to be cruel, Brother Caleb. But if what you believe you know of our arts was learned at the hand of Trent Ikithon nó Mandrake, then I’m not leaving either of you to fumble through any of this unguided.” 

Caleb tried not to wince. Protesting that there was no ‘this’ to fumble through was beside the point.

“You need at least as much retraining as our radiant Topaz --  _ not like that, _ ” he added sharply at the look of horror on Caleb’s face. “Never like that. Never as he trained you, not ever again. I swear that to you. But that is  _ exactly _ why you need to re-learn. To  _ un- _ learn what you were incorrectly taught. Neither of you are safe around each other like this. It rather defeats the purpose of guardianship, you understand.”

“Caleb?” Brother Fjord said uncomfortably. “He’s not wrong.”

“I know that,” Caleb said, with the taste of bitterness caught in his throat. “I know. Just… don’t ask me to break my vows.” _I don’t know how many times I’ll be able to say no._

“My dear student, anyone who could not separate the communication of theory from the tangible practical examination is unworthy of being called a teacher. Come on. Lesson one, entirely relevant to a guardian’s vows: aftercare for a newfound bliss-dreamer.”

He caught them both by the hand, and led them across the pool to where Molly was still utterly enchanted by the glittering candle-stars.

“Hello, my jewel,” Gil told him, smiling to see that he’d scooped up one of the fragrant peonies and tucked it into the curve of his horn. “Where are you right now?”

“Warm,” Molly decided, scooping up a palmful of water and smiling at the sparkle as it slipped through his fingers. “Happy.”

“That’s good, my dear. That’s... very good.” Gil’s voice trembled for a moment. Brother Caleb suddenly realized how hard this had to be for him, remembering the grief he’d struggled to put aside for the person who’d worn Molly’s brilliant smile for years before.

Gil was a consummate professional, though; he cleared his throat and put on a showman’s light voice. “Would you like to stay where you are, or would you like to explore further?”

“I want to _live_ here,” Molly told them all fervently. “Nobody told me hot-spring pools were an option!”

“Right here, hmm? Won’t your pretty clothes get wet?”

“Pfft. Who needs clothes?”

Gil laughed despite himself. “An excellent point, darling! Your beauty shines without any need of further adornment.  But remember, clothes make a marvelous excuse for shopping. And there’s jewelry too.”

“ _Ohhhhhh,”_ Molly breathed, his eyes alight with a nearly-intoxicated enthusiasm. “ _Jewelry.”_

Brother Fjord shoved half his knuckles into his mouth to try to stifle the giggles.

“Maybe we should call you Magpie,” Brother Caleb said, ruefully fond.

“Oh, they tried,” Molly said airily. “Didn’t work. The kids already knew who I am. More importantly: jewelry!”

He tried to pull his feet down and the floating pillow bobbled in the water, skating out from behind his head; already anticipating it, Gil curved a supportive hand behind his throat and kept his head above water.

“Easy, there. Just catch your balance for a minute first. Then we’ll all go and get dressed and--”

 _“Jewelry,”_ Molly reminded him, with the urgency of any two-year-old.

“Yes, dear, but we have to get dressed first.”

“Why?”

Gil threw his head back and laughed himself breathless.

“Why get dressed?” Brother Caleb asked, just to make sure he was following the conversational meanderings. “We need clothes to go jewelry-shopping.”

Gesturing extravagantly from horns to tail-tip, Molly said, “But clothes limit the landscape. Blank canvas, remember? I am _totally taking advantage of that._ ”

“Help me out here,” Brother Caleb said desperately to Brother Fjord, who had nearly lost his battle against the giggles.

“It’s cold outside the water?” Fjord squeaked.

“It’s practically midsummer,” Molly said, with the most eloquent eye-roll Brother Caleb had ever seen from a being without pupils. “Try again.”

“Silk,” Gil wheezed, still catching his breath. “Silk and veils and gauze, and golden-belled belts, and velvet-lined slippers, and--”

 _“Yes,”_ Molly said hungrily. “Fine. _Those_ clothes.”

“We are so unbelievably doomed,” Brother Fjord said, with an almost reverent sense of awe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I have several more chapters of this planned out, but they’re definitely not going to go up once a day. 
> 
> If you’re reading these, if you’d like to see where it goes next, please let me know?
> 
> ETA: Thank you so much for commenting, folks! It really does help to know people are enjoying the ride so far and it's worth going on with.


	11. The Page of Swords: Cassandra nó Dahlia de Rolo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Page of Swords: A clever, incisive, quick-witted young person. An analytical mind. The truth will be spoken whether or not you’re ready to hear it. 
> 
> The canon of Dahlia House is dignity, and their motto is “Upright and Unbending.” Cassandra has her hands full helping Gil and Allura tidy up these scruffy monks who remind her oddly of her brother: 
> 
> “I combed my hair,” Brother Caleb informed her.
> 
> “With what?”
> 
> “...my fingers?”
> 
> “...Did you know,” she said, “that seven hundred years ago the Caerdicci mastered the art of floating silver on molten glass, thereby creating a marvel of ancient technology that we of these latter days refer to as a mirror?”

_(Brother Caleb)_

When Sister Beau rejoined them in the dressing-room where Gil’s hand-chosen assistants were fussing about their guests with brushes and paints and fabrics and gilded baubles, she had the thousand-yard stare of one who had gazed upon the face of divinity and was still re-determining whether she had in fact survived the experience.

Huddled into a silk bathrobe that mostly cleared his knees, Brother Fjord said, “I’d tease her, except I think she’d win. She at least made it out with her clothes still wearable.”

“Yours are being dried and dressed,” the ashen-haired half-elf with the sheaf of notes and sketches told them. “As the rest of you ought to be. Cassandra, Allura, these two next, please.”

“I had to say something,” Fjord groaned, slouching lower in his chair as Cassandra walked over with a hot iron rod in one hand and a wooden comb in the other.

The next interval was a blur. Brother Caleb had been offered a private alcove to dress in privacy, and he was fiercely grateful for that consideration. But the moment he stepped back out, Allura’s lips pursed a bit and she set to precisely realigning every line of every layer. And then she pulled out a needle and thread and began swiftly, precisely baste-stitching straightened layers and crisp creases into place. Caleb’s only consolation was that Sister Beau was receiving precisely the same treatment at the hands of her adept, and she looked to be on the verge of mutiny.

A little further along, Brother Fjord’s adept had ripped all the side-seams out of his kirtle and appeared to be adjusting every stitch of it.

“Whatever fool tailored this was a purblind hack,” Brother Fjord’s adept muttered around a mouthful of pins. “A body sculpted by a Caerdicci master of old, and he dressed you in a potato sack? No. --Don’t move.”

Jester was entirely unphased, happily chattering with Molly and Gil and the adepts attending them; this was simply a matter of everyday life in her world. Molly was in raptures over the silks and gauzes Gil had promised him, and Gil looked insufferably smug about all of it.

Nott had climbed on top of Yasha’s head. She hissed loudly and swiped claws at any adept that came too close. This arrangement seemed to meet with Yasha’s approval, because none of the adepts had dared accost her with pins or fabric either. A couple adepts were conferring in the far corner with glances in their direction; Nott hissed at them too.

Brother Fjord looked like he was wondering if there was room for two on top of Yasha’s head.

From entirely too close to his ear, Cassandra said, “Sit.”

As a rule, highly trained Cassilines did not yelp when startled by teenaged hairdressers. However, it was a close thing.

“What?” Brother Caleb asked, in what he hoped was a respectable octave.

Cassandra held up her comb, and said, “Sit down. You’re too tall.”

“I combed my hair,” he informed her, trying for dignity.

“With what?”

“...my fingers?”

Cassandra crossed her arms and _stared_ at him. Somehow, the searing-hot iron curl-rod had ended up poised at an angle that looked both entirely intentional and incredibly menacing. Brother Caleb wondered when someone so young had mastered the look of glacially unimpressed expectation.

There was an empty chair beside her. Brother Caleb sat down.

It might almost have been soothing, having his hair combed and smoothed by expert hands, except that he could feel the screaming heat of that iron rod from three inches away, and it kept getting closer. He tried not to flinch any time it came within grazing-distance of his ear.

Finally, the heat source moved away. On reflex, Brother Caleb lifted his hands to feel what she’d done to his hair; she smacked the back of his hand with the comb and said, “ _No.”_

“But--”

“Did you know,” she said, “that seven hundred years ago the Caerdicci mastered the art of floating silver on molten glass, thereby creating a marvel of ancient technology that we of these latter days refer to as a mirror?” Holding one under his nose, she added, “Remind me never to introduce you to my brother.”

Well, having a brother likely explained some part of her mastery of the expectant stare. The world would tremble if she and Yasha and Sister Beau ever got to exchanging techniques.

Brother Caleb looked in the mirror, then tilted his head in confusion.

It was still his own hair, but… _organized._ Nothing was sticking out. There were waves and ripples that moved together somehow, like it was all the same shape, and the ends curled together instead of in eight different directions.

No wonder she didn’t want him to touch anything. He might break whatever it was she’d done to make all his hair do the same thing at the same time.

(In his own experience, he pulled his hair back, tied it there, and when too many strands straggled free and got into his face, he did it again. His hair didn’t do ... _this._ But then, he’d never previously approached his hair with hot iron rods that could double as torture implements in a pinch. Maybe it was some sort of threat-response?)

“You’re welcome,” Cassandra said drily, and tucked the mirror back into her pocket.

“Thank you?” he offered. “How did you do that?”

She opened her mouth, closed it again, held up one fingertip, thought it over for a minute, and then sighed. “Never mind, dear. Just call it witchcraft, and ask me to do it again some time.”

“All right.”

 _“Nice,”_ Molly said appreciatively from her other side.

He was wearing ...a towel, mostly. Mostly wearing a towel. And of course he and Gil had conspired together on the possibilities of a pristine golden canvas: He was half covered in vivid arches and swirls of body paint, and the base layer had been dusted with a glittering powder. He held his arms curved a handspan from his body with a dancer’s graceful precision, waiting for the paint to set.

“You’ll break me if I rumple him, won’t you.”

“It’s good that we understand each other,” Cassandra said. “You’re next?”

“If you can manage while Gil and Chèrie are painting me?”

“Right. Come on, then.”

As he followed her across the room, tail contentedly swaying from side to side with each step, Brother Caleb realized anew that Gil was a brilliant, merciless master of his chosen arts. The paint curled around his shoulders and sides, but his entire back was completely bare -- and the immaculate expanse of skin where an adept’s marque would have trailed up his back was entirely enclosed by the colorwork and outlined in pure gold. It made the evidence of innocence into a purposefully framed work of art.

Brother Caleb turned to Jester to ask more about her plans, and immediately clamped his hand over his eyes. He’d had a brief impression of leather straps, a few leaves, and entirely too much skin for her garment to be complete.

“I’m sorry,” he managed, half-strangled. “I didn’t know you were still dressing.”

“Oh, I’m done,” Jester said, amused. “We all thought it would be too obvious if Molly was the Horned God and I was the Summer Queen. So we swapped!”

“You. Um. What?”

“You know the old song? The Horned God chases the Summer Queen, and she lets him catch her, and then they spend about twelve verses inventing new erotic arts? I mean, obviously the Horned God is one of our kinfolk, and, well, not to brag, but I _am_ one of the leading authorities on the most excellent dicks in the entire City of Elua! And the Summer Queen dances seduction and wears all the flowers in her hair. So we totally had to switch.”

Brother Caleb tentatively peered through his fingers. His first impression hadn’t been far off. She wore skin-tight fur leggings and cloven hooves, an intricately woven leather harness with several strategically-placed leaves tucked in, heavy golden arm-bracers and a matching collar, and green leaves and berries woven around her horns. More leaves and vines trailed down her forearms, and Brother Caleb quickly decided not to look too closely at the figures half-hidden among the leaves.

“By the way, sit down.”

“What, again? --did I touch my hair?”

“Your hair is fine; we have to do your makeup!”

“Nobody said anything about makeup--”

“Brother Caleb, this is the Night Market. We have torchlight, lamplight, and moonlight. We need to have more highlights and contrasts in order to be able to see each other’s faces.” With a dimpling grin, she added, “Besides, we need to theme you too. ”

“Theme me?”

“The three of you are our  sworn guardians for the evening, so you’ll need to match us,” Jester said, as though it were obvious. “I know you have your monastic habits and all, but a couple of silk sashes and some body paint goes a long way. Sister Beau is a river; Brother Fjord is living things; let’s make you a scholar’s candle-flame. Some gold glitter on your cheeks, some dancing lights--”

“You’re teasing me, yes?” Brother Caleb asked, tentative. “This is what people do when they tease each other, and then we laugh, and then you don’t go through with it?”

“Well, of course I’d like you to laugh; I’m of Orchis House. But I’m totally going through with it. You’d be even more gorgeous with firelight in your hair.”

“What?”

Jester took his hand, patted the back kindly, and then dragged him over to Gil and Chèrie. She was stronger than she looked.

Apparently even their makeup was scented somehow. Caleb sneezed at the glittering gold pigment Chèrie dusted across his brow and over his hair. She smudged brighter reds and oranges along his cheeks, shadowed under his jaw with flame-blue, and then produced a pencil that she aimed directly at his eyes: “Look up. Don’t flinch. Don’t blink.”

(The intense fear of losing an eye to a badly timed twitch was a surprisingly effective paralytic.)

She produced an array of red and gold scarves from somewhere, buttoning them into the cuffs of his sleeves, as though there were fire burning from inside his robes and trailing down his hands. Another longer scarf was draped across one shoulder and tied at the other hip, like a herald’s sash. She tipped her head to the side for a moment, lips pursed.

“On the one hand, you need a crown of fire. On the other, Cass will kill us both if I touch your hair.”

“I’m a sworn monk, ma’am. I can’t accept a crown.”

“Oh, you’re right! A choker’s an even better idea.”

As Chèrie searched the contents of a drawer of costume jewelry, Brother Caleb closed his eyes and wondered where he had fallen short of Cassiel’s purity of devotion, for Blessed Elua to see fit for so much of temptation’s decadence to be strewn madly across his path.

“Well, damn, you don’t clean up half bad,” Sister Beau said. Cassandra had woven a rich spill of pearl-strands and ribbons in shades of blue into her topknot, and they spilled down over her shoulder like a waterfall; she had a silken blue sash fastened over her robes as well.

“Likewise,” Brother Caleb said, considering the weight and length of her pearl strands. “I wonder, if you move quickly enough…”

“Weaponizing the hair bangles? Hell yeah. Spar later? I’ll bet we could pull some tricks with the sashes too.”

“Cassilines,” Gil said, amused.

Brother Caleb turned around, and realized that Gil hadn’t been joking about the idea that he could throw on a bedsheet and make it work.

He stood there every inch the Lord of the Deep, dressed in the manner of a Caerdicci sea-god sculpted by an ancient master, gracefully wrapped in yards and yards of silk dyed in seafoam-green and deep ocean-blue. He’d woven pearls and gems through his hair, set half a sunken treasure’s worth of coral-melded coins arrayed in a heavy collar about his throat and shoulders, and leaned on a staff studded with mussels and drifting moss.

“Tell me, Brother Caleb, how would one go about enticing your young green friend to serve in our Horned God’s wild retinue? With just a bit of styling--”

“No ‘styling,’” Brother Caleb said immediately. “Tell Yasha she can watch over M-... Topaz and she’ll be his living shadow, but no ‘styling.’ Nothing they haven’t chosen for themselves.”

“I’m afraid we can’t invite Yasha unless she’d accept a mask of some sort; we don’t want to associate any of the circus-folk with our initiate. ‘Chosen for themselves,’ though -- clever notion; I’ll have a word with Allura.” He drifted across the room like a wave of sea-foam, murmured in Allura’s ear, and she looked at him with a raised brow, then gave it more careful consideration.

A few minutes later, Allura had assembled a dinner-platter with an array of cups and plates on it. Some of the cups held snacks and nuts; the plates held fox-furs and leather straps and veils and masks and green berried garlands and costume jewelry.

Yasha and Nott watched her approach skeptically, and when she was still a few steps away, Nott set up a warning growl in the back of her throat.

With exquisite poise, Allura set her offering-platter on the nearest table, bowed as though to a royal heir, and returned to her previous task. Gil was much less subtle about glancing over to see whether the gift was accepted; he bit his lip against a grin when Yasha picked up the tray and Nott sat on her shoulder to inspect the offerings.

Yasha brushed her fingertips lightly against a silver fox’s pelt; Nott, ever practical, went straight for the glittering costume-jewelry. She dangled the focal stone of a necklace against Yasha’s forehead like a crown, but without pins it slipped; Yasha wrapped it around Nott’s waist like a fancy belt instead, and turned wrist-bangles into ear-loops.

Gil looked like it might just kill him not to go over and provide dressing-advice. Brother Caleb stepped quite deliberately on the trailing hem of his seafoam-silks, and at the indignant look told him, “Leave them alone. They’ll do fine.”

“But, my Goddess, the missed opportunities,” Gil mourned, looking at Yasha’s statuesque figure.

“Leave them alone, or they’ll bolt. You don’t know how close I was to bolting myself.”

“Now that, I do know,” Gil said wryly, and patted Caleb’s cheek. “Turn left, Brother; I want to watch your face.”

“All right, but…”

Brother Caleb turned, and all the words went away.

Crowned with an extravagant glory of flowers and gemstones, the riotous tumble of curls framing Molly’s face had been sculpted into soft ringlets, between Cassandra’s hot iron and judicious application of a glossy glaze. She’d brushed gold and scarlet powder into a few individual curls, and settled gem-glittering nets of gold over the curls of his horns, and perched a lily and three soft peacock-feathers behind his ear.

Somehow, with nothing but pigments and stains and powders, she’d softened the planes of his face, rounded the curve of his lips, and the scarlet and gold artistry about his eyes made the red irises natural, inevitable -- not blood but rubies, garnets, precious gems in a gilded jewelry-setting.

More of the gold-threaded netting sleeked over his arms and swept down to a pearl-studded point at the back of his hands, blurring his musculature, but showing off the exquisite flowers and vinework painted into luminous skin: the Lady of the Greenwood, clad in summer’s most sensual glory.

His dress was made of two long, near-translucently fine silk scarves looped through a golden ring at the back of his neck and pulled forward as a halter that flirted enticingly over his flower-art, leaving his entire back bare to reveal that beautifully framed display of innocence. A golden belt alternating jewels and bells draped over the curve of his hips, and a dozen more colorful petal-scarves drifted down to caress his thigh or calf or ankle. Golden sandals tied with gold-leafed vines and flower twined up his ankles and calves, teasing the skirt-hems, and the bells chimed softly with his every step, his every breath.

“Exquisite,” Gil said, utterly satisfied. “Go on, then. Show off my artwork. Try out that range of motion?”

Molly laughed softly, a flash of white against exquisitely painted lips, and spun on one foot to flare the silken petals around his hips, then sank down into a backbend that let him trail his fingertips along the back of his own calf. Then he skimmed both hands up his thighs, brushing the skirt-layers away from the gorgeous line of his skin for a moment, and Gil made a sound of wanton pleasure.

He uncurled his spine one slow inch at a time, head still cast back and hands tracing the path of twisting vines that reached up toward the sun to arch into bloom, and then swung the stretch over into a theatrical bow-and-flourish that had the flower-blooms and peacock-feathers nodding gaily with him.

“Glorious, my jewel.” Gil took his hand and kissed the back of it softly. “You’ll be the envy of the Night Court. Isn’t our Topaz magnificent, Brother Caleb?”

There were still no words.

Molly looked almost hurt for a moment, and Caleb scrabbled desperately for something, anything, to say. He couldn’t force a sound through the knot in his throat.

“Let me translate for him, my dear,” Gil murmured against Molly’s cheek, with an affectionate arm curled around his hip. “‘I am a holy virgin without the faintest notion of how to handle the stunning vision of desire that has just walked up and hit me between the eyes with a fencepost. Pardon me, I need a moment to go lie down and question my faith.’”

Molly snorted his opinion of that, and took three swaying steps closer to Caleb, trailing fingertips over his cheek and into the hollow of his throat. Whatever he felt in the frantic race of his pulse chased the shadow of hurt from his eyes; with an imp’s grin, he bent forward and brushed a kiss against Caleb’s temple, adding, “Don’t forget to breathe, darling.”

When he turned away, Caleb reached out and caught his wrist, an entirely involuntary reflex. Surprised, Molly turned back.

“You, um. You look. Uh. _Scheisse."_

“Yes, dear, I know,” Molly said, indulgent, and squeezed his hand gently. “Thank you, Brother Caleb.”

He nodded stiffly, and when Molly tugged his hand free, this time he let him go.

“A word of advice, little brother,” Gil murmured. “You won’t be able to keep him on a leash.”

“I _wouldn’t,”_ Caleb snapped. “I’d never ask that of him.”

“No, darling, I mean that almost entirely literally,” Gil said, amused. “You’re going to sincerely wish that you _could_  keep him on a leash before the end of tonight. Between the pickpockets, the thieves, and the Mandrake and Valerian adepts, all our jewels will likely have need of all the protective supervision the lot of us can arrange.”

“How can I tell which of them are Mandrake or Valerian?”

Gil stared at him for a moment, then passed a hand down his face as he murmured, “Cassilines. Yes. All right, here.”

He grabbed one of the kohl-pencils, then sketched a flower in each of Caleb’s palms.

“Valerian in your right hand. Mandrake in your left. Look for the flowers, or for whips, or for bindings. Don’t let anyone bind him with anything. If you need to cause an incident, do. If you need an excuse, blame my orders as an overly officious Second to the Ruby and her family. However, I sincerely hope the greatest challenge you face will be keeping up with one sparkle-drunken butterfly gaily flittering from shop to shop.”

“So we’ll need a floating perimeter and pre-arranged signals too.”

Gil tilted his head in inquiry.

“My arts are different than yours, but I’ve studied them near as long,” Brother Caleb said. “My art is the protection and safekeeping of those I serve. Do you share any hand-signals in Jasmine House? Ways to indicate distance and the direction of a threat without pointing?”

“Oh, Brother Caleb, I _like_ you,” Gil said, delighted. “Let’s scheme.”


	12. Night’s Doorstep - The Three of Cups

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Three of Cups: Laughter, gaiety, friendship, conviviality. A celebration and a tipsy toast with friends. Joy in abundance. 
> 
> Molly is far more at ease in the Night’s Doorstep than Brother Caleb, who’s lived in the city for years: 
> 
> “You suffer so beautifully, my dear; it’s practically an art. Speaking of which -- there’s sure to be a bookshop hereabouts, isn’t there?”
> 
> “Three of them. What are you looking for?”
> 
> “The illustrated edition!”
> 
> “...Yes, well done. That would be exactly how to cause me to suffer in a bookshop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Still writing! Just at a more sanity-compatible pace. :D Here's about 20 pages of festival! And yep, all of the NPCs are CritRole characters too. The Sapphire Special is what happens when tieflings get their hands on a frozen dessert that started at the intersection of bing-su and chamoyada -- before they dumped a ladle of hot sauce over the top.)

Scheming with Gil was an enlightening, frenetic, and somewhat worrisome experience, but by the end of it Brother Caleb felt confident that everyone understood at least the very basics. Or, if not _understood_ , at least had come to a certain sardonic grasp of the essence.

“Just so I have this clear,” Molly said. “You need me to be seen as Topaz, both by the people you’ll introduce and by quite a few people whom you _won’t_ introduce, but emphatically _not_ by _other_ people whom you also won’t introduce because they shouldn’t meet me at all.“

“There, you’ve got it, darling.”

“And I shouldn’t try to distinguish which are which because if I can see their flowers that clearly, they’re already too close.”

“Yes, exactly! Leave the veils draped forward too. Just don’t _look_ like you’re hiding. Casual, sociable stealth.”

“This is my art-safe facepalm,” Molly said, streaking an expressively exasperated hand over his face a precise inch above the body paint and glitter as he shook his head. “Just so you know, Gil, there is _so much_ facepalm happening right now. So _very_ much. I want this noted. Someone take a note.”

All in all, it was well past sunset by the time the group of them set foot into the market-square known as Night’s Doorstep.

In truth, Brother Caleb had never ventured this far into the realm of the Night Court before. When sent to perform Cassiel’s work, he was more accustomed to protecting the nobles of the court of day, the sages of the magistrate, the venerated scholars of the collegium. Still, he’d thought he understood the concept and the rumors: under the harsh glare of the sun, it was a hundred stalls selling cheap and gaudy wares, a dozen shadowed alleys and warrens for the more disreputable to lurk and hide, the sort of place where Nott would scurry across rooftops to avoid unwanted attention from taller, meaner street-chaff.  

Seeing it reflected in Molly’s eyes by moonlight, Brother Caleb saw something else entirely: a glorious riot of color and pageantry, the sounds of song, the rhythm of dance, the delicious scents of a dozen vendors’ savory wares and sweet treats, all mingling together. Torchlight danced over laughing faces and colorful costumes and extravagant flourishes from the practiced hands of both performers and adepts alike. Fire-spinners flung illumination in blazing arcs; a pair of drummers held the heart-rhythm for dancing feet and clapping hands and a piper’s giddy reel above the ebb and flow of the crowd.

Breathing a deep sigh of contentment, Molly said, “Now _this_ feels like home.”

Gil gave him a glance more startled than Caleb suspected the adept would have wished to admit. Jester said it aloud, though: “Do you remember this? This place, and not Jasmine House?”

“Jasmine House is what we scarcely dared dream of. A court of luxury out of a bard’s legendary tales. You could actually find us here, though. A carnival that’s grown roots,” Molly said, gazing around with eyes that knew none of the specifics and yet all of the elements. ”I don’t need to remember when I _know_ it to my bones.”

“Then maybe you’ll be our guide instead,” Brother Fjord said, smiling. “I don’t think any of the three of us have been here after dark before.”

“First guess, don’t eat anything from a meat-vendor?” Sister Beau said.

“Oh, don’t worry there,” Jester said. “Rumor’s faster than lightning here; nobody stays in business if they sell bad meat. Unless you’re worried about how it looks? Cassiline monks eating sausage off a stick -- I mean, I’d happily pay to watch, but…”

Sister Beau groaned, scrubbing both hands over her face and smearing the blue glitter. Brother Fjord said, “And now I’m gonna have that picture in my head forever, thanks so much.”

“Fork and knife,” Sister Beau said, and grinned with all her teeth at Fjord’s expressive flinch.

“Hand pies,” he counter-proposed a bit desperately.

“Do I tell him?” Gil asked Jester under his breath; her giggle was not in the least reassuring.

“Please leave us _something_ we can eat guilt-free,” Brother Fjord begged.

Brother Caleb made the hand-sign of _alert at 4_ , and when Fjord and Gil turned to look, he flicked their ears with a fingertip. “Perimeter,” he said, “or we’re going to lose track of a gemstone already.”

Sure enough, Molly was already three shop-fronts down, kneeling beside a little girl who was exclaiming over the flowers in his hair. The hand-gestures were unmistakable; with a flourish, he produced a shell-pink rosebud from behind her ear, and handed it to her with a showman’s  smile.

Even Jester’s thought-voice was caught between amusement and despair: _It’s not my fault! We told him no carnival-tricks, I swear. I mean, that one’s harmless but if he sets anything on fire I’m--_

Twenty-five words, Brother Caleb realized as she cut off short, already moving to rejoin Molly. Brother Fjord was Jester’s visible guard, as Sister Beau was Gil’s; Yasha in her white wolf-mask was nominally Jester’s guard as well, but the tilt of her mask’s muzzle sometimes hinted otherwise. Still, they made their guarding-triangle a little lopsided on purpose, never moving two of their points at the same time.

Nott was entirely invisible; that was fine by Brother Caleb, who trusted her wary-watchful abilities more than any of the rest of them combined, himself included. She’d already known the Jasmine House hand-signals, and likely the Cassiline ones they tried to keep private as well; she’d laughed at him when he had tried to explain about particular flowers to watch for. She would be fine.

Through Cassiline-trained eyes turned to duty, Brother Caleb saw yet another view of the marketplace: A thousand potential threat vectors, constantly in motion, many of whom looked nominally civilian.

That adept with a leash on a pale-haired young man-- yes, that was a Mandrake marque. Caleb put himself between Molly’s growing cluster of clamoring children and the Mandrake adept, but the adept was clearly intent upon his prize, and his prize was gazing up the hill toward the Houses. They left in that direction a few minutes later.

Another man standing just on the edge of shadow, just around the corner of the alley between the food stalls, scowling as he leaned over a smaller figure in blue. Brother Caleb wasn’t going to leave his position, but a small finger-flick caught Yasha’s eye.

Yasha loomed far, _far_ more effectively than the alley-lurker did. He found an excuse to move on.

Molly’s little flock of children themselves -- one of them was toying with the golden bells on Molly’s belt, brow furrowed in concentration. Molly seemed entirely oblivious, intent on teaching the shell-game to the audience in front of him, except that his tail sneaked around and tickled the would-be pickpocket in the ear.  

The child gasped and swatted on reflex, found herself with a handful of tail, and stared at the gold coin Molly had cupped in the spade-tip as though she were facing off a venomous cobra.

After a minute’s terrified truce, Molly’s tail-tip felt for the child’s face and shoulder -- so he’d caught the little thief with a touch-sense, not peripheral sight or magic. Once he’d found a shoulder to orient by, his tail slithered a path down the child’s arm despite a visible shudder, twined around the girl’s wrist, and deposited the coin in her palm before slinking away.

The child scrambled to her feet and dashed away as though Molly had set the hounds of hell on her. Throughout it all, Molly hadn’t missed a beat of his easy patter, though the set of his shoulders was tense.

The remaining children whispered through their guesses of which shell held the pebble, and pointed at one; their shrieks of disbelief when Molly turned over an empty shell were piercing, and Caleb angled to position himself between most of the crowds and the little tent-corner where they played, just in case someone wearing the wrong flowers would happen to glance over.

One of the children grabbed the shell out of his hands and poked at it vigorously, determined to pry loose some sort of trick-mechanism; the next two shells were similarly scrutinized, and then three skeptical little d’Angeline faces stared up at him in unison.

“It’s really a magic jumping pebble?” one of the boys asked.

“Absolutely magical,” Molly assured them, entirely guileless. “Just like Gail’s flower. Try it yourselves!”

“But it doesn’t jump for us!”

“Tell you a secret,” Molly said, leaning in closer. “When you get home? Ask your sister to share her magic coin with you. Maybe more of it will rub off.”

“Is it your demon-magic?” the other boy asked, wide-eyed. “Is that why we can’t make it work, because we’re d’Angeline?”

“Magic is magic, and skill is skill,” Brother Caleb said, because there were at least three painful ways Molly could have answered that and Caleb hadn’t wanted to make him say any of them aloud. “And his blood is the same color as yours and mine.”

“Skill is skill after extensive practice,” Molly said, rueful, and handed the shells and pebble to the children. “And so is magic, really. Do ask your sister about her magic coin!”

Three little heads nodded vigorously, and then they went back to inspecting the shells for any sign of trickery. Molly brushed the dust from the hems of his silken scarf-dress with a few flicks of his tail-tip, and smiled up at Brother Caleb.

“Ordinary shells?” Caleb murmured, still angling himself between Molly and as much of the crowd’s gaze as he could.

Molly jerked a thumb over his shoulder at a jar of them on a shelf, and said, “A farthing apiece, five to a penny.”

Turning just enough away to be able to scan a broader section of the crowd, he said, “I’d remind you about Topaz, but you really can’t help yourself, can you.”

“Well, I _could,_ but I’d bore myself to tears. And then I’d ruin the paint, and then Chèrie would strangle me. And then Gil would frame my hide on the wall as his greatest masterpiece, and nobody wants to see that happen. So really it’s far better for my health that I _don’t_ get bored to tears. --Oh, look, more fire dancers! Come on!”

With a small sigh, Brother Caleb said, “Jester would like me to remind you not to catch anything on fire.”

“No promises!” Molly declared, already walking toward the ropes they’d set up to protect an audience from any leaping far-flung embers.

“No, of course not. Because you can’t possibly make our lives simple, can you.”

“But you suffer so beautifully, my dear; it’s practically an art.” He did stop at the edge of the rope, but he strained forward like an eager puppy at a leash, clearly aching to join them in their dance. He would have been beautiful at it, too, with the glorious silk and intricately painted art; but this Molly had to be a different Molly for the night.

“Topaz,” Brother Caleb said, as both an address and a reminder.

“Yes, I know. Speaking of which -- there’s sure to be a bookshop hereabouts, isn’t there?”

“Three of them,” Brother Caleb said, because while he’d never been to Night’s Doorstep after sunset, bookshops were bookshops night or day. “What are you looking for?”

With a grin full of too many pointed teeth, Molly said, “The illustrated edition!”

After a moment of blank bemusement, Brother Caleb managed, “Yes, well done. That would be exactly how to cause me to suffer in a bookshop.”

“I’m not much good at reading,” Molly said with a light shrug, his gaze following the arch and flare of the fire as the dancers spun and leapt. “I had other things to learn. So, in order to study these physical arts properly, if there’s an illustrated edition? I want one. Honestly, I’ll still need someone to read the texts to me if I’m to catch up at any reasonable speed.”

Caleb froze in the act of scanning the rest of the crowd, and said, “Someone to read _that_ book to you.”

“I mean, if a certain highly educated monk who’s already been riding my ass in all the ways except the one I’m most interested in were to spend some of that guarding-time aiding in my education, it _would_ be marvelously efficient. Two birds, one bone?”

“One _stone!”_

“Clearly you’re not reading the books I’m reading! So, which way is the best bookshop for porn?”

Brother Caleb had to clamp down on the impulse to put a hand over Molly’s mouth to shush him, or over his own face to hide; Chèrie really would strangle him if he rumpled his scarcely-tamed hair or smudged the effort she’d put into delicately shifting Molly’s features atop Ruby’s glamourie.

“You’re asking a _celibate monk about porn,”_ he said instead.

“Of course I am. You’ve sworn off live action and you actually _enjoy_ books. I mean, I assume the literary variety doesn’t scratch precisely the same itch, but somewhere in the neighborhood, yes?”

“I, um. I’m. Not an authority.”

Tearing his attention away from the fire-dancers, Molly stared at him for long enough that Brother Caleb could feel his cheeks warming from a blush. He turned his attention back to the milling crowd in the marketplace, because at least that he could handle competently.

He didn’t jump when Molly tucked an arm through his, though it was a near thing.

“Firstly noted, I should’ve asked Sister Beau. Secondly noted… what is it that you’ve sworn, Brother Caleb?” Molly murmured.

His vows were long since familiar, a prayer and a reminder as much as a binding. Still, it helped a little to keep scanning the crowd and only catch Molly’s expressive face in flashes of fire at the periphery of his vision.

“I live to protect and serve, as the angel Cassiel protected and served Blessed Elua, in honor, devotion, and obedience. I draw my daggers in defense; I draw my sword solely to kill. Should there be need, I will lay down my life at the feet of my ward. Should no path but one remain, I will set us both free. I guard, I watch, and I await the final reward of vigilance.”

“...My God, I can’t even tease you about that. I don’t know how to handle this.”

Caleb risked a glance sideways. Molly looked at least three quarters sincere, and a bit pensive.

Of course, a moment later he shook it off with a bright and toothy grin: “Sister Beau! I can _absolutely_ tease Sister Beau. That’s a relief; for a moment there I thought I was in actual trouble. All right, I’ll spare your monastic blushes, darling; I’ll drag her off to the porn shop instead.”   

“That is _not an improvement,”_ Brother Caleb said, in a certain wondering despair. The image of Sister Beau and Molly loudly bickering their way through the erotica section of a bookshop looking for naughty picture-books gave him what felt like spiritual indigestion.

“Then you’d prefer to be my educational text-procurer after all?”

(He couldn’t say “ask Jester” because she was his sister. He couldn’t say  “ask Gil” because Molly _would_ ask Gil, and that was if Gil didn’t blithely offer first. Gil and Molly in the erotica section was an even worse idea than Sister Beau and Molly in the erotica section.)

“...Elua’s mercy. Yes. Fine.” It wasn’t as though he didn’t owe Molly more recompense than that already.

“Thank you, darling.” Molly patted the back of his hand, and then neatly cut his knees out from under him with a cheerful call to their carefully-loitering friends.

“Milady nó Orchis, milord nó Jasmine! Brother Caleb’s taking me book-shopping for study materials!”

Brother Caleb could see the exact moment Sister Beau realized what ‘study materials for the Orchis initiate’ meant, because she choked, coughed, and thumped a fist against her chest to try to swallow back the laughter.

“Of course he is,” she wheezed, the traitor. 

“It’s a bit outside his field of expertise, obviously, so what titles should we look for?”

“Oh, let’s all go!” Jester said brightly. Which, tactically speaking, made all the sense that the Cassiline in him should have recognized at the first -- even as the monk in him yearned for anywhere he could hide his face in privacy.

“I’m sure each of us has our own favorite reference works,” Gil said, and took Sister Beau’s arm so that she wouldn’t entirely double up laughing. “I’d be delighted to share my favorites with such a beautiful young initiate, of course.”

Brother Fjord said to Caleb, “Just so you know, I blame you personally for the mental trauma we’re about to receive.”

“That’s mostly fair,” Brother Caleb admitted.

From further ahead, Yasha flashed a sign - _alert at 2 -_ and Jester immediately diverted the group to the left with a sound of delight.

“Oh! Come over here, Topaz, you’ve got to try the _best shaved ice ever._ And you can only get it right here! Hello, Elena -- this is my House’s newest initiate, Topaz, and he’s never been to the City before, so he _has_ to try a Sapphire Special...”  

Sister Beau spotted the adept Yasha had signalled for, and wandered a bit further into the crowd to expand their perimeter. Jester positioned herself so that her hand on Molly’s shoulder coaxed him to turn so that his back -- golden-skinned and gilt-framed without any sign of a marque -- would be the first thing the watcher saw. And she didn’t miss a beat in her laughing chatter.

“No, don’t tell him, it’ll spoil the surprise! Here, let me pass it to Teera...”

Jester handed a cup of ice and fruit to the next stall over, a Bhodistani crepe-seller who clearly knew the routine; Teera winked at her as she drizzled a ladleful of blood-red sauce over the treat, then handed it back.

“And some mango goes on top, and _now_ you try it!” she declared, scooping a spoonful and angling it for Molly so that he would tilt his head far enough that she could scout over his shoulder.  

Molly took a dutiful bite, and then his eyes shocked wide and he made a startled squeaking sound, putting a hand over his mouth as he crooned in delight.

“Isn’t it amazing?”

“That is an orgasm on a spoon!” Molly declared, stealing the spoon in question and turning toward Caleb. “Here, you have to try this.”

“Don’t!” Gil said hastily, catching Molly’s hand before he could complete the gesture. His eyes were sharply tracking over Molly’s shoulder and Caleb’s both, and the crook of his fingers against Molly’s wrist cued _don’t move_ . But aloud, he finished the warning in a much more mundane direction: “Topaz, my golden jewel, an uninitiated d’Angeline palate is _not_ well suited to pure Bhodistani pepper sauce.”

“It’s the Sapphire Special because nobody else can stand it,” Teera said, with a grin and a wink.

“That’s not true; Mama and Lili like it too! Demon-kin love pepper sauce. We really, _really_ love pepper sauce! How can anyone _not_?” Jester asked, just a hair too brightly. Then she stepped around Molly to face the woman walking up behind him.

Brother Caleb had a brief impression of black velvet and ice-pale eyes before Jester shoved a heaping spoonful of the pepper-sauced dessert into the woman’s mouth.

“See, Delilah, isn’t that the best treat you’ve ever tasted? Your House has a special understanding of pain, after all, and-- oh my goodness. Gil, I wonder if maybe you were right after all.”

“Of _course_ I’m right, darling. I’m _always_ right.”

Gil’s fingers released the _don’t-move_ signal, and Brother Caleb turned in time to see the woman turning almost as purple as Molly usually was, staggering away with tears streaking down her face.

Molly kept his back dutifully turned, but even without pupils to track, Caleb would swear he was straining to catch a glimpse of the woman out of the corner of his eye.

“Seriously? It’s not _that_ hot,” he said. “And when you pair the heat-kick with the ice and the fruit and the sweetness…” He made another sinfully happy little sound.

“Yes, exactly! But you and I have a different appreciation of pepper sauce than our d’Angeline friends do, sweetheart,” Jester told him, handing a gold coin apiece to Elena and Teera and taking another pair of spoons. “We should go and do research on why that is! Indoors, probably. With some books.”

“Benjamin Cole’s is just around the corner,” Brother Caleb said, glancing around for any more too-darkly-dressed adepts.

“Chastity’s Nook,” Gil said firmly. “Delilah’s sort wouldn’t be caught dead in Chastity’s Nook.”

“Oh, much better!” Jester agreed. “Come on, Topaz, we’ll ask Iva about the _special_ collections. Thanks again, gals! You’re my favorites.”

Ordinarily, neither would any Cassiline be caught dead in Chastity’s Nook -- that was one of the very few places where Mandrake and Cassiline standards overlapped. But Brother Caleb traded a glance with his teammates, who both nodded without hesitation. Brother Fjord took point on scouting forward across the square toward the little shop of scandalously insinuating and titillating books.

“Occasionally I hate it when you’re right,” Brother Caleb told Gil.

“Get used to it, little brother; it happens with some frequency.” Under his breath, he added, “Different small talk, if you please; less conspicuous when we amble and chat.”

“What the hell,” Sister Beau said to Caleb as she moved up to cover Jester in Fjord’s place; she sounded almost admiring. “He’s actually not half bad at subtle.”

“Coming from a master of subtlety such as yourself, O sainted sister, I consider that high praise indeed.” Gil looked almost innocent, except for the gleeful glitter in his eyes.

Sister Beau shot him a sidelong glare, and added more loudly, “I mean, from a guy who walks around wearing an overgrown handkerchief that screams orgasmic symbolism to the entire marketplace, you really wouldn’t have guessed.”

“He’s wearing _what?”_ Brother Caleb asked, appalled.

“Oh dear,” Jester said, lips twitching; she scooped another bite of fruited-peppered ice from the cup Molly held as an excuse to keep her mouth full.

Gil looked distinctly pained. “An _overgrown handkerchief?_ This is hand-dyed Akkadian silk that cost thirty gold marks per yard!”

“I notice which part you’re not disputing.”

“My dear sister, in our business, _everything_ is orgasmic symbolism. The marques, the flowers, the poetry, the bindings and releasings…”

“He’s wearing a _wave,”_ Brother Caleb protested. “I mean, it’s a nice wave. Nice silk. Just ...draped. Like an ocean wave. Isn’t it?”

“Ah, my sweet summer child, I haven’t the heart to explain,” Gil said with a sigh, fingertips poised at his temples.

Sister Beau said to Molly, “Thumb-wrestle for it?”

“Dibs. Adept-initiate here,” Molly said; he handed the ice-dessert back to Jester and tilted his head to rest against Brother Caleb’s shoulder, with a flutter of gold-touched eyelashes that was entirely unfair. The peacock-feathers in his hair tickled softly against Caleb’s cheek.

“Brother Caleb, think about the rhythm of the ocean. Think about waves cresting, and climax-points, and pounding against the shore, and the spatter of white foam-spray--”

“Please stop there,” Brother Caleb managed, half strangled.

Snorting on a laugh, Sister Beau clapped Molly on the shoulder: “All right, points to the new guy.”

Brother Caleb let his thoughts disconnect from the conversation thread in sheer self-defense, scanning the crowd as he followed the chattering adepts and Sister Beau through the square, always exquisitely, excruciatingly aware of Molly’s arm through his and Molly’s body at his side. His hand was warmer than a d’Angeline’s, and his body a radiant living heat only barely covered by silken veils and chiming jewelry.

With an odd jolt, Brother Caleb suddenly understood why succubi were so often portrayed as demon-kin, as Molly’s kin. Even when he wasn’t trying, the beauty of his expressive face and the warm sensuality of his supple body held a gentle but inescapable magnetism.

It was almost a relief to reach the door of the bookshop and usher everyone inside. Except for how it wasn’t at all, because he’d placed his hand against Molly to guide him through the door without even thinking.

The shocking heat of his bare skin and the slip of sheer silk against the hollow of his back seared themselves into Caleb’s hand so sharply that he stood in the doorway, stunned by the lingering sensation-memory in his fingertips, until Sister Beau planted hands between his shoulder-blades and shoved.

Brother Caleb stumbled through the door, glanced around to re-establish his place and the perimeter, and… well. He’d never before realized how many of Chastity’s Nook’s pamphlets had _illustrated_ covers.  And there was art on the walls. Very naked art. Usually coupling, if not, er, tripling or more. Brother Fjord had already discovered this, and had claimed the vantage-point facing out the door with slightly crazed eyes.

Once Caleb was no longer in her path, Sister Beau marched right in and made a beeline for the section that helpfully labeled itself “Ladies Only”, with a little winking-eye sketch in the corner.

(In his most frantic scrambling thoughts earlier, he hadn’t imagined a worst-case scenario that had Sister Beau, Gil, Molly, _and_ Jester all in an erotic bookshop at the same time. Brother Caleb really wasn’t accustomed to being _insufficiently_ pessimistic about anything.)

Jester and Gil were murmuring to each other; Jester gestured with her cup -- she bounced in distracting ways, what with all the straps -- and Gil bent his head in what looked like unhappy acquiescence. Then she breezed past all three of the Cassiline guardians, heading back out the door.

“Wait, ma’am -- weren’t we _all_ coming inside for, er, Topaz’s books?” Brother Fjord asked her at the door.

“Oh, I’d hate to risk getting pepper sauce on any of Iva’s lovely things!” Her thought-voice added, _If Sylas or somebody comes looking for explanations of what happened to Delilah, I’m the one they’ll see on the doorstep, and I can be--_

“That was twenty-five,” Brother Caleb reminded her quietly.

“Right. Anyway, I’ll be right outside with my _completely harmless_ dessert that I couldn’t _possibly_ imagine anyone _not_ enjoying, just in case. Brother Fjord, would you come with me?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Brother Fjord said, looking like he’d gotten a last-minute reprieve from the hangman’s noose.

Sister Beau was _entirely_ absorbed in the Ladies Only section. Brother Caleb sighed to himself, verified that they were the only customers currently in the shop, and braced himself for the experience of Gil introducing Molly to the tantric literature collection.

“We don’t often get Cassiline monks in here,” the shopkeeper said, peering over the rims of her spectacles in interest. “You know, I have just the books for you!”

“That’s really not necessary; I’m simply here to protect my wards.”

“You read, don’t you?”

“Uh…”

“Thought so! You know, I’m sure you’d enjoy my latest volume of erotic poetry. You look like a poet. I’ll be right back!”

Brother Caleb struggled with his pride for a moment, then moved closer to Gil and Molly and said urgently, _“Help me.”_

Gil bit his lip, but the corners of his eyes crinkled with the smile he was struggling to hide. Molly didn’t bother hiding his grin.

“So who do you think would distract her best? The actual poet, or the expert in bullshit-as-performance-art?”

“Let me handle her. Iva’s a darling, but somewhat prone to excess.”

“Gil. Honey. When _YOU_ call a person ‘prone to excess’…”

“I do speak with some authority on the subject, yes.”

Again, intellectually, it made sense that a person who chose to make a living selling erotic and scandalous books and art would have some level of personal interest in the subject. (Brother Caleb knew he would make a terrible erotic bookseller, both because of unfamiliarity with the subject matter and because of his own difficulties in parting with books.)

He just hadn’t been prepared for exactly how detailed her knowledge of the matter would be, or how eager she was to share her enthusiastic and encyclopedic expertise.

Molly was having more fun watching Brother Caleb squirm than participating in the literary analysis; his book consideration method involved flipping through for pictures and roughly sorting on that front.

Meanwhile, Iva was visibly concerned that a new initiate’s _only_ selection criterion would be ‘has lots of illustrations,’ with no consideration for the quality of the text or accuracy of the research.

Gil tried to steer the conversation as much as he could, mentioning “a solid grounding in classics like the _Trois Milles Joies_ and the _Ecstatica,_ ” or “de Montrèval’s treatises on the art of the _languisement,”_ or inviting her preference between “the Delaunay edition or the Laveau-Perrin edition” of some particularly scandalous hand-copied work of erotic arts and poetry. But Iva was difficult to distract when she had her teeth set in a topic.

“Topaz dear, really, those aren’t even _good_ illustrations. Inspirational, certainly, but not at all accurate for someone without a double-jointed spine--”

Just to prove a point, Molly bent over backwards as swiftly as though someone had cut his marionette-strings, then very nearly sat on his own head.

“I’m flexible,” he pointed out, tugging some of the skirt-silks aside with his tail-tip to grin up at her from where he was almost hugging his knees. Then his tail plucked one of the peonies from the bouquet coiled about his horns, and he dropped it into her startled palm: “I’m an acrobat with a tail, milady. I can make a _lot_ of things work.”

“Oh my _goodness,”_ Iva said, a little breathless.

“Naamah’s glory,” Gil agreed, husky-voiced. Brother Caleb had seen that expression before in a painting by one of the old masters: a triumphantly, ecstatically mad angel who’d just heard the voice of divine inspiration speak in tongues of flame.

“Do you need a hand up?” Brother Caleb asked, trying hard to ground himself in the practical and concrete.

Molly laughed, and pointed one foot with a playful toe-wriggle before kicking into a walkover that left him standing upright without having touched more than two fingertips to the floor.

“So, inspirational _or_ aspirational, really.”

“You. That. Um.  ...advanced topics, definitely,” Iva managed, and darted off toward the section marked “Restricted.”

“If the dowayne had not given me the training of you, my exquisite gem, I would have sold the marque from my own back for a chance to earn some small share of that honor,” Gil said, with the mad angel’s fire caught spark-smoldering in his eyes.  “You were born a work of art, but it will be my life’s crowning glory to guide you as you grow into a treasure fit for the angels themselves.”

“Why, thank you, O exalted master of overembellishment in all its forms,” Molly told him, wry. “Careful of my ego there. Modesty is not among my many known virtues.”

“Modesty is a bloody _waste,”_ Gil said fiercely, reaching up to cup a hand to the flower-twined curve of his horn. “Modesty and shame both -- we have no need of either, you and I. Leave that to the likes of Alyssum House.”

Tangled into the inescapable knowledge that Gil would take such pleasure in teaching Molly his erotic arts, there was a hot little coal of something Brother Caleb couldn’t name, burning just behind his breastbone, twisting and searing the back of his throat. Echoing in the palm of the hand that had felt silk slide over Molly’s bare back, and wondering what it would feel like to place his hand there while they stood face to face, while he could feel the heat of Molly’s breath.

Even the bathhouse hadn’t affected him nearly as badly as that one accidental touch, because that intimacy had been _Molly’s_ choice, and his vows merely required that he refrain and remain on guard. He’d held to that standard of guardianship his whole life. But the touch at the door had been his own choice, his own reaching out, even unaware of what he’d done.

Molly was his _ward._ He’d never been ...desirous of his own sworn _ward_ before. His task was to protect Molly’s safety with his life if need be. His task was _not_ to risk harm coming to his ward because he’d fallen prey to the same distracting desires that fractured the focus of other d’Angelines. The same desires the Cassiline Order swore to set aside, in the name of their sacred devotion to the act of love as _protection,_ not love as passion--

Gil bent his head forward toward Molly’s face.

A Cassiline monk never closed his eyes against his duty. A Cassiline monk never looked away from his guardianship.

But despite his sometimes-brutal clarity of memory, three seconds later Brother Caleb didn’t know whether Gil’s lips had brushed against Molly’s cheek, or perhaps the curve of his horn, or the crest of his ear. At some point, he’d averted his eyes.

This was _ludicrous._ It was beyond absurd to -- to _envy_ a Servant of Naamah’s touches, when their sacred devotion was precisely in the sharing of passion with all. A Cassiline should be _incapable_ of envy. It was doubly absurd to envy Gil’s place in teaching Naamah’s arts -- what, like a monastic virgin could have taken his place in the teaching, taken Molly into that ecstatic trance with word-weaving and the caress of elemental powers? Or like he could even have known which of Iva’s books to choose--

“I found them!” Iva announced from far too close, and only long years of training kept Brother Caleb from startling away.

Gil and Molly were both _looking_ at him.

And Molly’s other mentor had wrung something near half his life’s story from the single word _Saarbrege_.

There was _no way_ this could end in anything but a disaster. 

In a strange twist of Elua’s mercy, though, Iva’s single-minded obsession provided Brother Caleb with a moment of awkward shelter; she pushed an entire stack of books into his arms, and began happily pointing out the spines to Gil and Molly.  

“The _Trois Milles Joies_ and the _Ecstatica_ for the foundational classics, both of them illuminated! _Scent of the Sea_ for a broad sampling of contemporary arts, and De Montrèval’s treatises on the _languisement_ for focused study, and _Jasmine’s Embrace_ in honor of your House, of course -- these are my own annotated copies, mind; I’ll lend them to you for your studies, but I’ll need them back someday. And I _knew_ I had a hand-copied set of Anafiel Delaunay’s correspondence with his Prince. It’s the most heartrending thing I’ve ever read; he was such a poet, and such a visionary. It’s a tragedy what they did to his published works as the political winds shifted. And this one on top is for you, Brother: _Guard of my Heart_. Not that it’s from the restricted section, of course; it just seemed to speak to your life. I’m sure you’ll love it! So very inspirational.”

(Brother Caleb had occasionally felt less threatened by drawn blades than by the sheer unrelenting force of this bookseller’s enthusiasm for pushing romance, smut, and pornography into his hands. After all, he’d been in his share of bar fights with intoxicated wastrels without a clue how to use their weapons. In contrast, this woman knew her chosen weapons _very, very well,_ and would compose a treatise on the spot as to which of them was best suited for a particular act.)

It wasn’t sensible to use a Cassiline as a pack-mule. The noble-born of the realms paid for Cassiline skill in combat, not for strength in porting merchandise. But Brother Caleb clung to the stack of books as Gil paid Iva, and as Sister Beau bought three of her own, and as the group of them trouped back into the marketplace, following a laughing path toward a jewelry-seller Jester and Gil had promised to Molly.

If his arms were full, Molly couldn’t cling and cuddle and entice, not in the same way. If his hands were full, he couldn’t find himself brushing his hand against Molly’s bare skin the way a moth seared its wings against naked flame.

None of it was the flame’s fault. Searing heat and brilliant light and vivid, flicker-dancing glory were a celebration, not a crime. But any stupid, splendor-staggered, passion-reeling moth that blundered in too close would pay the fire’s price regardless.


End file.
